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Senior Projects Spring 2012 Bard Undergraduate Senior Projects

2012

Shamrocks and Chopsticks: Representations of

Nationalism in Two Chinese Translations of James

Joyce's Ulysses

Kelley Shannon McLaughlin

Bard College

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McLaughlin, Kelley Shannon, "Shamrocks and Chopsticks: Representations of Nationalism in Two Chinese Translations of James

Joyce's Ulysses" (2012). Senior Projects Spring 2012. Paper 367.

h<p://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2012/367

Shamrocks

and Chopsticks

Representations of Nationalism in Two

Chinese Translations of James Joyce’s

Ulysses

Kelley S. McLaughlin

Shamrocks and Chopsticks:

Representations of Nationalism in Two Chinese

Translations of James Joyce’s

Ulysses

A Senior Project Kelley S. McLaughlin

Conducted Under the Tutelage of Lihua Ying

Bard College

2011-2012

Acknowledgements

I need to express my sincere gratitude to Ross Greenwood and Leng Sining

for their help in procuring materials; Liu Ziqian, Leng Sining and Zhang

Jin for their insight as Chinese people; Cassandra Olson for sharing her

knowledge of Republican and Communist Era propaganda as well as for

being the first civilian victim of my introduction; Willem Molesworth for

sharing his knowledge of post-colonial literary theory; Luisa Lopez and

Alexandra (Sasha) Patkin for being even further off the deep end than

myself every step of the way and for Bloomsday celebrations; and

Jeannette Benham, for bottomless mugs of tea and tedious hours of staring

out the window, trying to find the perfect word. Also, thanks are owed to

whoever first decided that putting leaves in a mug with hot water was a

good idea. Without constantly refreshed infusions, the tea in my system

would have dried up long ago and left me with nothing but blood, and

blood is nowhere near strong enough to get you through a project like this.

For their infinite patience with my infinite questions—and timely

answers!—at all hours of the day, I would like to thank professors Gregory

Moynahan, Andrew Schoenbaum, and Terence Dewsnap.

Most importantly, I am indebted to my primary advisor, Ying Lihua, for

putting up with my many months of insanity, my unceasing questions, my

immovable stubbornness, and my frustration on this journey. Not everyone

would have agreed to let me tackle a topic as challenging and obscure as

this, and even fewer would have been willing to learn as much as she did to

accommodate me. Somehow, we both survived, and I suspect that has a lot

more to do with her than with me.

Photo courtesy of Ross Greenwood

“A nation that keeps one eye on the past is wise.

A nation that keeps two eyes on the past is blind.”

~Anonymous

The Garrick pub in Belfast, Northern Ireland

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION...................................................................................................... 8

CHAPTER 1 Where Terrorists and Poets Meet: Two Translation of Ulysses

An Examination of Attention to Nationalism in the Footnotes ............................... 31

CHAPTER 2 Potato Potahto: Two Translations of Ulysses

Translating the Voices of Segregated Politicized Ethnicities ................................... 59

CHAPTER 3 An Irish Victory at Last: The Critics’ View of Ulysses

The Role of Nationalism in the Eyes of the Chinese Readership ............................. 76

CONCLUSION Bloom in Beijing or Stephen in Shanghai:

Monogenealogical Brotherhood and Hybrid Nationalism .................................... 101

Notes ................................................................................................................. 106

Works Cited ....................................................................................................... 114

INTRODUCTION

“No, the fault lies with the artists,” Claire went on. “The writers, the singers, the tellers

of tales. It’s them that take the past and recreate it to their liking. Them that could take a

fool and give you back a hero, take a sot and make him a king.”

These words were written to repudiate modern representations of ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’

as a hero of Scottish history, because in reality the man was nothing of the sort. Glorious

depictions and fond memories of the young pretender exist because of something far more

complex than a single man; he was vying for his throne, but in order to raise an army he had

the inspired idea to stir up the nationalist sentiment of his countrymen—countrymen that he’d

never met. That is why people honor him to this day, because he was a nationalist, because he

was fighting—or at least pretending to fight—for his country.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines ‘nationalism’ as “a sense of national

consciousness exalting one nation above all others and placing primary emphasis on promotion

of its culture and interests as opposed to those of other nations or supranational groups.”

When discussing James Joyce’s Ulysses, one of the most intricate issues to engage is that of

nationalism. Whether or not Joyce himself was a nationalist is a vexing question still today, but

the fact remains that his novels, his short stories, and even his short drama Exiles are layered

with levels of meaning, and chief among these buried messages are near-constant

pro-nationalist/anti-loyalist references.

Emer Nolan has argued that “Joyce’s unyielding pacifism strictly circumscribes any

possible debate about his nationalist ‘sympathies.’”

While it is true that the author Joyce

would not have lifted a hand against the English, that does not mean he would not or did not

lift a pen against them. Whether or not Ulysses can be understood as a nationalist epic, it does

reject violence and the stereotypically Irish notion of the times that renewal was a product of

bloodshed, especially as romanticized by the celebrated poet and active nationalist Pádraig

Pearse, himself executed during the fallout from the Easter 1916 uprising.

The blatant satire surrounding the Citizen

in the twelfth episode of the text is

confirmation of this; as Nolan argues, the Citizen embodies the stereotype of the Irish

individual as a terrorist. He contrasts this stereotype against that of the Irish as poets, and

claims that the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive, that the Irish poet and the Irish

terrorist are merely two forms of what he calls “practically incompetent Celts[s].”

Thus even

though the Irish Literary Revival was technically separate from the Fenian (Republican)

movement, it was not in fact completely removed from it. Writers including Joyce, and even

William Butler Yeats, fall into the category of the practically incompetent Celt, devoted to the

doctrine of inaction, or as they themselves would have it, pacifism.

The Irish replacement of culture with politics has long aggrieved critics and historians, and

Joyce hoped to rectify that conception of Irish literature by giving birth to something more

modern, a “protagonist engaged with cultural memory and national identifications, but not

eclipsed by them.”

David Lloyd would carry the understanding of this particular construction

one step further, to claim that this modern individual, who is the new nationalist hero, although

physically separated from his nation, has found the ‘spirit of the nation’ and embodies the

promised national unity that someday will reach his fellow men.

What this all means is that, in fact, Ulysses is precisely all of that; a loaded non-violent

anti-nationalist nationalist epic.

This project will explore Ulysses as a nationalist text from a Chinese perspective in three

steps. In the first chapter, I will examine the idiom of nationalism in the footnotes of two

Chinese translations of Ulysses that were both published in 1994. In the second chapter, I will

examine the translation of specific ethnic voices in the body of the novel itself. In the third

chapter, I will further examine interpretations of Ulysses in the critical eye of the Chinese

reader in order to firmly establish the perceived role of nationalism, the will of the translator,

and the outcome of the translations in their intended audiences.

The ‘why’ of such a project may not be immediately clear to the unsuspecting reader, but it

is inherently interesting that the first two translations of such a novel were both published in

1994. Given that that date is already seven decades after the novel was originally published,

why was there such a rush to get it on the market that they came out one on top of the other?

Maybe it is not important that both were published in the same year, but what the historical

landscape of the 1990s was.

Ulysses made some ripples in China as soon as it hit the ground in 1922, just two decades

after the Chinese began to really explore western literature, when the frenzied translation of the

turn of the century had not quite died out yet. At the time, perhaps the style was too new and it

was too daunting a task to translate Ulysses in its entirety. Of course, so many countries were

reluctant to publish Ulysses because of its content that censorship certainly was an issue.

Published at the end of the great wave of translation, it managed to catch the eye of some

Chinese scholars, like the poet Xu Zhimo. Unfortunately, despite the efforts of Xu and others,

it was a bad moment for Ulysses, because even though the individual was becoming the center

of some scholarly thought under the care of Hu Shi, there was the Chinese crisis of nation that

would overpower that, led by such writers and scholars as Lu Xun.

Up until the rise of the Communist Party and its control of the publishing industry in 1949,

the principal factors working against Ulysses were its genre and style; the vast majority of

Western literature being translated and Chinese literature being written at the time is classified

as realist, and were meant to be accessible to the everyday reader, two things which Ulysses is

not.

The two branches of this tendency, one embracing literary realism and one espousing

literature for the everyman, in large part grew out of the May Fourth Movement, which began

in 1919. The movement was sparked by the western powers’ refusal to return German occupied

land to China after the First World War. Instead, they recognized Japan’s claims to those same

territories, provisioned for in the Treaty of Versailles: Article 156 transferred the occupied

territories to Japanese rule.

Students in Beijing hit the streets in protest of the Treaty. The revolution in 1911 to

overthrow the Qing dynasty had wanted modernization, but the change effected by the

replacement of one form of government with another had only whetted the public appetite. The

May Fourth Movement in 1919 became an ideal medium for the expression of this desire:

inspired by Western texts and thought, the students rejected the clan system, traditional

morality, and Confucianism.

The social side of the movement had been initiated earlier on, in 1916, as coincidence

would have it. There was a push from Chinese intellectuals to make culture more accessible to

all social groups. To this end, the traditional system of writing known as wenyanwen (文言文),

a language that required years of formal education to master, was replaced with a new system

based on vernacular Chinese, called baihuawen (白话文), with the purpose of making writing

accessible and relevant to everyday life. The effect of this combined cultural and social

revolution on translation practices was that most of the foreign literature being brought into

China was realist.

Obviously, Ulysses came onto the international scene at an importunate time for western

literature in China. China was faced with serious social and political problems, and radical

Marxist ideology was believed to offer solutions. Leftwing literature dominated the Chinese

market, and the Maoist regime took the position that literature should only be used to promote

and extol the virtue of the laboring peasant classes. Unorthodox, blasphemous Ulysses, in all

its bawdy glory and anti-heroism, would have been seen as in direct opposition to such a

stance.

In some way, the lightening of the burden of history that Ulysses suggests would have

suited the motives of the May Fourth movement and its iconoclastic stance, and later the

Cultural Revolution. However, the May Fourth movement was preoccupied with enlightening

the masses, and the Cultural Revolution was an absolutely isolationist movement that banned

Western writing. Under the Maoist regime, speakers of Western languages came under

suspicion. Additionally, the stark anti-heroism and focused attention on the individual as the

ultimate would prevent Ulysses from being a top candidate for translation in such a political

environment. Furthermore, this era in China was also marked by its almost non-extant output

of any fiction with literary value; the figure quoted by Perry Link for the years 1949 to 1966 is

an average of eight domestic novels per year,

and the bulk of these were fictional works of

propaganda in support of Party policies and ideology. This is because almost immediately after

1949, the autonomy garnered by intellectuals between the overthrow of the Qing and during

the May Fourth movement evaporated. It was replaced by Mao’s own Marxist/Leninist

construction of intellectualism, which subjected artists and intellectuals to Party campaigns to

eradicate individual nonconformist thoughts and actions.

In 1976, the Cultural Revolution ended, and with it the Maoist regime and its control over

literary production. The movement that emerged was the so-called ‘Root-Searching

Movement’ （寻根派）, which aimed to ground literature in traditional Chinese culture. Parallel

and antithetical to that was the recommencement of relations with the West through Deng

Xiaoping’s Open Door Policy. The influx of foreign literature and literary theories resumed as

China began to play a lightning round of the catch-up game.

Some of the better known authors that were translated in the 1980s and 1990s are Agatha

Christie, William Faulkner, C. P. Snow, Eudora Welty, Norman Mailer, John le Carré, and Alex

Haley. But aside from these more innocuous authors, other postmodernist writers were also

introduced into China. Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel (La vie de Gargantua et de

Pantagruel) was translated in 1981, the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (À la

recherche du temps perdu) in 1987, the first abridged version of Nabakov’s Lolita and

Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad) in 1989, and Cervantes’ Don

Quixote de la Mancha was retranslated in 1994. Translating this particular selection of texts, as

well as those of Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein et al, served the dual purposes of giving to the

audience new and truly modern literature, as well as providing inspiration for contemporary

Chinese writers.

All this is not to say that Ulysses was ignored in China until its translations in 1994. In fact,

the opposite is true. Xu Zhimo was studying at Cambridge when Ulysses was finally published

in Britain in 1922. He read it immediately, and praised it in his usual extravagant tone,

This novel is probably not unique just this year, but perhaps in this entire era.

The last 100 pages is truly pure ‘Prose’

; as smooth as cheese and as

illuminating as the stone alters found in churches. Not only are there no capital

letters, but there are also no bothersome punctuation marks at all, and it’s not

divided into chapters or sections or sentences. It is like a large bolt of white silk

hanging down, a waterfall falling up, seamless—truly a great work by a great

westerner!

In 1935, Zhou Libo

wrote Joyce, which opposed Ulysses entirely, as again would happen in

1950 with Zhu Guangqian, and in 1964 in the article “Review of the American Stream of

Consciousness Novel.”

In 1979, Qian Zhongshu used the language of Ulysses to explain the

bizarre lexicon of the famous Chinese work Records of the Grand Historian.

And finally, in

1981, the second episode of Ulysses was published in translation in the journal Selected Works

of Modern Foreign Fiction.

Why did Jin and Xiao-Wen choose to translate Ulysses at a time when China was

attempting to bolster its own sense of self? In his introduction to the text, Xiao wrote, “it

doesn’t matter whether or not you like it, it will always be this century’s miracle of human

literary creation.”

He believed, too, that even if Chinese readers were not ready for this kind

of literature themselves they should at least be aware that the West has such a text as Ulysses,

and understand its artistic intentions and writing techniques. He believed when he first read it

in the 1940s and when he translated it in the 1990s that it would have some effect on Chinese

writers.

In Jin’s introduction, much less emphasis is placed on his encounter with the novel. His

self-proclaimed goal in the translation is to produce a text as true to the original as possible,

with the hopes of replicating the effects of the original on an English reader in a Chinese reader

as closely as possible. And though he never states it explicitly, the reason for such faith to the

text is that the text is so full of art, imagination, and creativity that only through such an

‘original’ reading can the reader fully comprehend the awesomeness of Joyce’s creation.

In an interview that took place in 2005, Wen Jieruo said that she chose to approach Ulysses

from the angle of nationalism, a fact which may prove very important when considered in

tandem with how nationalism in the Xiao-Wen translation is presented. Otherwise, the most

direct statement of purpose from any of the three translators claims that, “today, this novel has

already become the most important English literary writing of the 20

century,”

but Jin does

not say why this is so, just as Xiao does not when he calls it a “miracle of human literary

creation.” Yet since none of them even hints at another reason for translation, I can not ascribe

any further motivations the translators might have had for translating Ulysses.

But besides being a great innovative masterpiece, is there anything else in Ulysses that

attracts the translators to it?

One day during my junior year abroad, on a rainwashed street in the bustling city centre of

Belfast—Chichester Street, to be precise—I came upon an unremarkable pub called The

Garrick. On the side of the building facing opposite to the flow of traffic there are six lines of

unsigned words. They say,

A nation that keeps

one eye on the past

is wise.

A nation that keeps

two eyes on the past

is blind.

There are no quotation marks, no progenitor.

This anonymous piece of wisdom is of the kind typically assigned to the island of Ireland, a

nation that has been fixated on its own history for a thousand years, both politically and

culturally. Even up to this day it is a fragmented island, stewing in its own bitter past.

Everything about it draws attention to the fact that both eyes are turned backwards. Evidence

may be found in the Troubles, now ‘officially’ over. Yet when I was there in the spring of 2011,

there were consistently bomb threats, and even a sectarian killing in Omagh of a young

Catholic policeman named Ronan Kerr. Invariably, the festive marching season (Orange Order

parades) and St. Patrick’s Day are notorious for violence and rioting.

Literature, too, has suffered at the hands of this backwards-looking national identity, while

simultaneously reaping the benefit of the tragedy it brought. Never mind the recent waves of

conflict and post-conflict novels, plays, and films. We need look no further than Ireland’s most

prized poet, William Butler Yeats, and his contemporaries such as Augusta Gregory, George

Bernard Shaw, John Millington Synge, George Moore, and so on. Together they formed and

founded a movement known variously as the Celtic Twilight, the Irish Literary Renaissance,

and the [Irish] Literary Revival. Each of these names speaks towards this attachment to the past,

precisely as intended. The movement drew inspiration from thousands of years of history and

mythology, and sought a return to those halcyon days of harps in Tara’s halls and an

Irish-speaking free republic. In conjunction with the analogous political movement (i.e.

Fenianism) this revival cultivated bloody slaughter, martyrdom, civil war, and the partition of

the island.

Joyce, who was writing at the same time, watched this disaster from afar and with

disapproval. His works, particularly A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses stood

against this rising tide of fatalistic nationalism. Ulysses would push the idea that the way to

distinguish Ireland, the way to free her from the encumbrance of the oppressor, was not the

Hellenisation that Buck Mulligan offers,

but rather to cut the historical baggage and drop the

desperate attempt to revive a dying language, turning one eye towards the future.

As I mentioned earlier, much of the literature that emerged from the immediate post-Mao

era belonged to a genre associated with the Root-Searching Movement, which was

ideologically not unlike the Literary Revival of turn-of-the-century Ireland. They were both

movements nostalgically mapping the future of their nation in terms of the perceived greatness

of their past. Given that both of the first two complete translations of Ulysses arrived after the

waning of the Root-Searching Movement, is it possible that somewhere within the translations

the three translators express their disillusion with that approach to nationalism, either through

annotations to the text, in their translations of ethnic voices, or in their own commentaries on

the translations? Did they understand the differences in types of nationalism? Did any critics

pick up on a similar anti-nationalist theme? Those are the questions and issues that this

research will investigate.

Reflections on the Translation of Western Literature in China

The twentieth century started with a bang in China—the Boxer Rebellion, encouraged by

the high Qing court, in which all things foreign were seen as evil. This was followed in 1911

by the overthrow of the Qing dynasty and the establishment of China as a republic and Sun

Yat-Sen as president in 1912. Sun is known for his ‘Three principles’: nationalism, people’s

rights, and people’s livelihood. The Nationalist party, or Kuomintang, was founded in 1912

upon these three principles.

The losses of the Chinese against the English and the Japanese respectively in the Opium

and the Sino-Japanese wars spurred the Chinese to rebuild their nation employing western

ideas, which in turn gave rise to an enormous wave of translation of western novels at the end

of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth.

In the first two decades of that century, when the first wave of translation was taking place,

the modern concept of nationalism was violently burgeoning in China. It would have been an

ideal time to translate Ulysses. But as Xiao Qian wrote in the introduction of Ulysses,

believed China was far too poor and underdeveloped to climb what he refers to as the ‘ivory

tower’ that is Ulysses. To China, Ulysses was an ivory tower in two ways; not only is it not a

realist novel, it is also a highly inaccessible work of literature. However, Xiao Qian did not

mean to say that China would or should never have it; in fact he believed the opposite.

Historically, as well as contemporarily, texts were selected for translation because

someone—usually the translator—thought there was some value to the readership of the target

language, whether this value be literary, cultural, political, religious, or suchlike. The most

obvious example of this are the myriad translations of Lin Shu

completed between 1899 and

the year of his death, 1924. It has often been suggested that since Lin could speak no foreign

languages himself, his selection of texts was actually given to him by his collaborators. This is

hardly a fair assumption, since even though it does mean his scope of choices was limited, it

does not in the least reduce the choice Lin had in deciding whether or not to translate any given

piece. Furthermore, Lin always took great care in the prefaces or introductions of his

translations to explicitly state what reason he had to do the translation and what value he saw.

It is true that much of the literature Lin worked with is mostly unknown today, but several

pieces certainly stand out to the modern reader—not just scholars. These include such titles as

La dame aux camélias, Don Quixote de la Mancha, Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe,

Ivanhoe, The Old Curiosity Shop, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. La dame aux camélias was the first

Western novel that Lin Shu translated. He defended this choice by claiming that it is a foreign

Dream of the Red Chamber, which is China’s most well known text and is also frequently

praised as the highest achievement in literature. Lin goes further to argue that the Dumas piece

reflects an individuality in love that China lacked, even at the end of the nineteenth century.

He would later seek such similarities and lessons from other texts. When he prefaced his

translation of Allen Quartermain, he drew parallels to Records of the Grand Historian, another

of China’s great texts. When he translated The Old Curiosity Shop, he said he had selected it

for its representation of human nature. Referring to human nature, he said, “It is an eternal, no

matter who they are, the Chinese or foreigners, cannot overstep it.”

His mixture of motives,

which included popular opinion, subject matter, perceived similarity to existing Chinese texts,

and what “was needed,” all had roots in a single intention. As Gao Wanlong puts it in an article

on the subject, “to save the nation from subjugation and ensure its survival.”

Likewise in his

introduction to Oliver Twist, Lin would defend his choice as motivated for the good of the

nation. He wrote, “What I regret is that there is no one like Dickens who can cite age-old

malpractices and dramatize them in novels in order to inform the government of their existence.

If there were, the transformation of Chinese society might be possible.”

Yan Fu, another

renowned Chinese translator, used a similar basis for selection, although he focused on

sciences and social sciences rather than literature, his most notable translations being those of

Thomas Huxley's Evolution and Ethics, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, John Stuart Mill's On

Liberty and Herbert Spencer's Study of Sociology.

For this reason and for the other reasons enumerated above, the translation of Joyce’s work

was delayed until 1994. What was the nationalist situation in China like at this point in time? If

it had been burgeoning violently when Ulysses was originally published in 1922, it was fast

becoming a coherent, cohesive entity in the 90s and continues to do so today in such a way as

to cause concern in some other nations of the world. Discussions concerning the future of

China, which emerged from the ashes of the Cultural Revolution, sparked off great political

and intellectual debate over the significance of nationalism early in the decade. This debate

took many groups of well-educated people by storm; social scientists, humanities scholars and

writers especially. Some groups, media among them, turned to history as a means of promoting

nationalist sentiment, some suggest merely to further certain nationalist goals.

These choices all point to one thing: a strain of nationalism designed to relieve a crisis of

nation such as China had been undergoing for almost the entirety of the twentieth century by

rebuilding China—and its people—from words up. It began with this influx of Western

thoughts, morals, ideals, which they hoped to glean a great deal from, much as the Japanese

had done before them. This lingual reconstruction would be continued with considerably more

vigor when the language reform began in 1920s with the takeover of vernacular (baihua)

Chinese as written language, and was continued in the 1950s with the introduction of

simplified characters and the mandatory study of standardized Mandarin in schools; this was

all done in an attempt to unify and nationalize the language, giving the citizen a clearer

identity.

Coincidentally—or perhaps not—when Xiao and Jin began their translation of Ulysses in

1990, China was at the end of another wave of nationalist revival not unlike the one Lin Shu

was working under. In the 1980s and early 90s as at the turn of the twentieth century, China

looked to the west in its efforts to modernize and construct a modern national identity. After the

lack of new literature during the Cultural Revolution, the ready-made literature pouring in from

the west was conveniently pre-packaged with all the tools the emergent nation thought it

needed, and accessing the western mentality through the literature that embodies it is a viable

route because literature is easily accessible, easy to transmit, and covers the entire spectrum of

topics.

Like with the intellectuals of the Celtic Twilight, a standardized national language and

literature are intricately linked to nationalism in the Chinese context, which is almost

antithetical to the Joycean approach to nationalism. For example, take Ulysses, considered to

be a great Irish epic, despite the fact that it is written in English, i.e. not Irish. Yet at the same

time, despite being written in English, it is being written against English, a paradox which will

be explained in the next section.

Joyce, Nationalism, and Ulysses

Nationalism is a tricky topic with Joyce, because his work appears to the uneducated eye

as being against nationalism, given the context in which it was written. He was working during

the Irish Literary Renaissance, an era renowned for its nationalist literature—and for its literary

martyrs. In the first two weeks of May 1916, the 15 leaders of the provisional government to

the newly proclaimed Republic of Ireland, also known as the leaders of the Easter Uprising,

were publically executed. Five of those men, Pádraig Pearse, Roger Casement, Thomas

MacDonagh, Michael O’Hanrahan and Joseph Plunkett, were recognized writers for Yeats’

literary movement. For Joyce to distance himself from that movement—mover and shaker as

he was to become—must have felt like a betrayal. But not only did he actively not involve

himself in the movement; right in the midst of it he exiled himself from the island, and then

proceeded to write a series of progressively more blasphemous novels about it. By the second

work, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, he was confiding in broad daylight the reasons for

his irrevocable malcontent with home, motherland, and the Holy Roman Catholic church.

While other writers were dying for the cause, Joyce was in Zurich, writing Ulysses.

Fenianism, in some ways similar to Chinese anti-imperialist movements at the turn of the

twentieth century, is a name often assigned to the nationalist movement that coincided with the

Revival, a throwback to previous revolutions. It was a violent nationalist movement using

warfare to push at their goal of ‘liberating’ the ‘motherland’ from ‘oppression’. Joyce was

opposed to violence, so the militant nationalism of his peers and countrymen offended him,

and his own version of nationalism—if it can indeed be called that—sought an alternative route

towards the goal of his hot-headed compatriots such as Pearse.

Joyce’s strain of nationalism might be more aptly called ‘internationalism’. J.

Krishnamurti writes, “When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a

European, or anything else, you are being violent… Because you are separating yourself from

the rest of mankind.”

To Joyce as to Krishnamurti, traditional nationalism is dangerous

because it firmly establishes a dichotomy of self and other that will inevitably end in militant

opposition to the other. However, an insistence on internationalism is just as dangerous as

insisting on nationalism, because even though it is true that globalization is making the world

increasingly smaller by eliminating borders, the lack of physical barriers makes individuals

more ideologically aware of ‘nationality’ and therefore more firmly separatist.

In essence,

this is nationalism.

It is not for us, the reader, to decide whether or not Joyce loved his motherland, Ireland;

but it is clear from his writing and from biographical details that his relationship to Ireland was

very constrained. After all, a man does not voluntarily exile himself from his home if there is

not something bothering him. Joycean nationalism lacks an aspect of modern nationalism; the

belief that one’s nation will be better off individually rather than as part of a collective. Joyce’s

nationalism is actually contrary to this assumption; it is a kind of love for one’s nation without

separating it from the collective of all nations and without eliminating borders. That is not to

say that he is esteeming other countries on the same level as he did Ireland, although he may

very well have done so. It is more that he believed that Ireland would be better off in the world

context rather than by herself. The historical Ireland that the other writers were drawing on for

inspiration was always a land that could support its own lifestyle, but that suffered from the

poverty and simplicity that grows out of the isolation intrinsic to existing on the periphery.

What Joyce proposed was an Ireland not trying to escape back into the pagan past and that

benefitted from globalization.

Yet it cannot be said Ulysses is not a nationalist text. He was writing it from exile, but

still writing it about and set in Ireland. Joyce, exiled and transient as his life was, was aware of

the true global nature of life at the time, at least in Europe and the greater Western hemisphere.

In that way, then, if we consider Patrick Kavanagh’s line about universalism, “Parochialism is

universal; it deals with the universe

” it is easy to see that Joyce’s use of dozens of world

cultures and languages is really just a way to reinforce his subtle but intense focus on the

language and culture of Ireland.

And the degree to which it is Irish is compelling. The idiolect beneath all of the fanfare of

the deconstruction of English is that of Ireland; it overflows with local slang, historical and

contemporary cultural and literary allusions, hallmark Irish grammar structures, and Irish

archetypes as they go about their hectic lives in Dublin. Furthermore, Joyce took great pains to

incorporate as many place names as he could throughout the text, and to scrupulously time the

main characters’ movements through the city, so that it was as if they really are traversing

Dublin.

Simultaneously, Joyce is satirizing the protestant north and the oppressive English—as he

has done in his other works, most notably demonstrated in Ulysses by Deasy the Ulsterite,

Haines the crazy Englishman, and other minor characters such as the mindlessly-violent

English Privates Carr and Compton in the fifteenth episode.

Another indicator that Ulysses might not be as anti-nationalist as it appears, is Stephen and

Bloom’s constant thoughts and regrets about their treatment of women in their lives. This

applies particularly to Stephen, who is burdened with the weight of ‘killing’ his mother, who is

at once Ireland and the Church. He would not kneel down and pray on her deathbed. As for

Bloom, he worries constantly about the affair Molly is having with Blazes Boylan, while he

himself is verbally dallying with other women. Boylan is as jaunty a chap as someone

representing Britain ought to be. And Bloom cannot stop thinking about the affair because he

wants to get back in bed with Molly, which he does at the very end of the novel, as the reader is

left to surmise from Bloom’s actions in the seventeenth episode

and Molly’s climax at the

end of the eighteenth.

If Molly is Ireland, climbing in the sack with Britain, then Bloom’s

mistress-by-post Martha is perhaps Trieste or Zurich or Paris, one of the places Joyce ran to

when he exiled himself from Ireland. Yet Martha, wherever she is meant to be, is not ‘Mary,’

the sister who chose the Biblical better part, sitting at her lord’s feet. So there is certainly some

measure of modern nationalism in this work, even if Joyce is mocking the other archetypes,

such as the milk woman in the first episode as the Sean-Bhean bhocht; Stephen’s sister Dilly as

Róisín Dubh; the Citizen as a seanchaí; and Robert Emmett as a martyr, all of which are

character tropes used and abused by the Celtic Twilight to instill a feeling of love and duty

towards the island

through adhering to a past made problematic by the language that created

it.

In the case of Ireland, and perhaps many other nations as well, language is problematic.

Most people seem to assume that a contentious situation arises and is followed in creation by

the dialect used to describe it. Joyce believed the opposite; that the language comes first and

the issues arise as a result of the language. For example, the words ‘self’ and ‘other’ were

constructed, therefore giving rise to conflicts of self and other.

This message to turn one eye away from the history it has been fixated on is affected

through the deconstruction of the English language and therefore the destabilizing of such

conflicts. From the ashes, he takes up all the pieces and recombines them into a language that

we call Joycean. Seamus Deane, a scholar of post-colonial Ireland, rejects the efforts of Irish

writers to free themselves from the yoke of imperial language by distorting it into

Anglo-Irish/Hiberno-Irish, because they have freed themselves from nothing. The major

language, in this case English, is pre-established and pre-recognized, whereas the minor

language is only in a state of “becoming,” and as likely as not will never manage to debunk the

power of the primary language.

Indeed, this may seem like a conflict of interests. It is not. It would be impractical and

impossible to begin a language again, working from the base upwards. Besides, the idea is not

to forget history or culture but to abandon a blind tradition that cannot see the forest for the

trees. In doing so, Ulysses seems to say, Ireland can revive her once glorified name.

This message is buried in the form, in this case the language, for with Joyce the form is

everything—or form is content, and the language is the hero. The text, ostensibly a universal

tale, presents what could be argued to be one of the most vernacular novels ever written. But as

Patrick Kavanagh has said and as it has otherwise been said in several different ways, the local

is the universal. Even though Joyce strips the language and words bare, often of all but their

earliest meanings in an effort to remove the jilted trappings of culture and history, Ulysses

comes across as an extremely Irish work.

Tradition is mocked thoroughly and ruthlessly throughout the text,

from the absurdity of

the Citizen—a traditional Irish seanchaí, to Bloom passing wind as he stands reading the

martyr Robert Emmet’s exhortatory speech from the docks. Consider The Odyssey,

perhaps

the most famous epic in the western canon, for which Joyce’s novel was named, and which the

plot was taken from. That tale is named for its great hero, Ulysses or Odysseus, and from his

great deeds and adventures in the Illiad and the Odyssey grew an entire tradition of hubristic

heroes. Juxtaposed with that is Joyce’s mythopoeiac alternative of the same name, Ulysses, and

its protagonists, Stephen and Bloom. Protagonist; not hero. They are anti-heroes. The

implication is clear; if you take a hero and drop him into everyday life and make him carry out

those same deeds in the quotidian world, they become misadventures and stray perambulations

rather than heroic deeds. The hero is nothing, an unattainable ideal constructed from the past

for the present. The past is not all it appears to have been. Joyce laughs at Homer’s great man;

a weak man indeed. Joyce himself is known for shatteringly—and irreparably, for

himself—deconstructing the tradition of language, as well as the traditional form of the novel.

Reception of Ulysses in China

Given that Ulysses was received with esteem by some in China, enough so that the

stream-of-consciousness style interior monologue that Joyce is famous for would be imitated

by several authors,

it is no surprise that the translations were well received. The sheer

volume of scholarly articles written in Chinese on Ulysses since 1994 is indicative of a deep

fascination with the text. The warm reception was not just limited to scholars, either. During a

previous project that evaluated the two 1994 translations, I read at least 20 articles discussing

the advantages and disadvantages of each, especially towards the common reader, which

indicates that there was a viable readership of that definition looking for the solution. In fact,

the reaction was positive enough for a third translation to be done in 2009 by Zha Qunying.

Other countries, notably Poland, have also shown a great love for the novel. Indeed it has

been translated into about two dozen languages. Why? The Spanish were the most vocal on this

front, with three translations. According to Spanish critics, these translations are an

“undeniable sign of the value of the Catalan language,”

they “give prestige to the undeniable

cultural value of the Catalan language,”

and symbolize “a considerable accomplishment for

a language, a literature and a culture that had suffered from a ban on translations.”

Ulysses is

a book that empowers the target language, in the case of Catalonia, a language that had long

been suffering from a lack of outside influence. Languages, like cultures, are living things that

grow and morph according to environmental influences. New words grow out of Joyce in

English, words such as ‘Joycean’ and ‘tragicomic’

that are in common usage among literary

scholars today; perhaps translators hoped this kind of growth and development could revive

their own stagnating languages.

However, coming as they do in the midst of the Root-Searching Movement for China,

which might be considered equivocal to the Irish Literary Renaissance in aims, the two 1994

Chinese translations of Ulysses could have been made to carry the same weight there and then

as it had in its original context. Like-minded post-Mao literature that emerged around the same

time as these translations included the works of Su Tong, Mo Yan, Liu Heng, and others. In

novels like Nineteen Thirty-four Escapes （《一九三四年的逃亡》）and The Town of Olive

（《橄榄镇》）, published respectively in 1987 and 1989, there is a re-appropriation of history to

prevent it from being subjugated to the popular master narrative of history—the master

narrative written during the Mao era. As Xiao Bing Tang says, “The spectacularization of

history also points to a recognized need in postrevolutionary Chinese culture to search for a

new identity, a new self-cosciousness that can claim a different history than what has been

instituted in the past forty years or so.”

But in addition to claiming a different history than

that mandated by the Maoist regime, these authors recognized a need to distance themselves

from the history they intend to reclaim.

That is because history is a notoriously unreliable narrator, in China as in every country.

The old adage says, ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, and certainly the same is true of

history. Ulysses is a sort of anti-nationalist nationalist novel that reminds us we must—at all

times—keep one eye turned to the present and future. But do translators pay attention to this?

Do the translations demonstrate an awareness of nationalism? In their translations, does the

message come across? Do critics pick up on any such message? And if the answers to all of

these questions are in the negative, is there a conspicuous absence of reference to the topic?

CHAPTER 1

Where Terrorists and Poets Meet: Two Translations of Ulysses

An Examination of Attention to Nationalism in the Footnotes

“I’d fooled myself into thinking I’d some poems in me while I was in Dublin. It was

like hanging old clothes out to dry. Everyone in Dublin was a poet, maybe even the

bombers who’d treated us to their afternoon delight.

”43

Given that both the Jin and the Xiao-Wen translations are modern translations and in large

part dedicated to the preservation of Joyce’s original intentions, the footnotes, introductions,

post-translation notes and interviews are the most open areas for the translators to express their

own feelings and interpretations of specific moments in the text. It seems appropriate, then,

that if indeed the translators had a secondary objective in translating Ulysses other than the

obvious reason of sharing this masterpiece with an enormous part of the world’s population,

that it would manifest itself in the footnotes. Since my own reading of Ulysses relies heavily

upon it being an anti-nationalist nationalist epic, I will focus on unpacking the footnotes.

This chapter will examine representations of nationalism in the footnotes to both

translations, focusing on Irish nationalism, but also drawing on any other relevant

representations of nationalism anywhere, especially in England.

Across the entire eighteen episodes of Ulysses, there are constant references to past

nationalist phenomena, as well as to those contemporary to the given setting of the novel (June

, 1904) and those contemporary to the publication of the novel 18 years after its setting

(February 2

, 1922). These references manifest in many different ways; lines of poetry, song

lyrics, food packaging, obscure names listed in stream-of-consciousness, flyers, lucky tokens,

posters, and so on. Because the Chinese reader is at the mercy of the translator to provide

information on points of confusion, particularly the obscure or buried ones, how the three

translators approach these references is an important question for two subsidiary reasons. One,

the translator dictates which references get a footnote, which in turn decides the reader’s angle

of approach. And two, the translator dictates what information about the reference is provided,

whether or not the reader checks other sources, this influences how the translator intended the

story to be perceived.

What I found was that while both the Jin and the Xiao-Wen translations documented such

references, their explanations are in large part empirically phrased. Occasionally, there are

footnotes that are either dubious in nature or outright incorrect in their information; but these

are few and far between. What is striking about the footnotes is the discrepancy in quantity

between the two. The Xiao-Wen translation documents as close to every single reference as

possible, with the Jin translation giving maybe one third as many. Even if the latter approach

springs from Jin’s desire to keep the general understanding of the translation as faithful to the

common understanding of the original, it means that Jin was selective. That in itself is a level

of subjectivity that cannot be ignored when considering the overall effect of the translation.

The second interesting aspect to the footnotes in both translations is that even through all

their striving to represent the truth of a large number of nationalist references, they

under-represent or fail to notice the significance and huge import of some of the more obvious

indicators of nationalism in the original; such as Bloom’s lucky shriveled black potato, Deasy’s

wild inaccuracies and infinite tediousness, the recurring theme of the House of Keys, Privates

Compton and Carr’s bastardized English, and the Citizen’s potential Ulsterite allegiance. How

they do choose to discuss these issues will begin to reveal the translators’ awareness of subtle

differences among nationalisms. This is a topic that needs to be further explored, and that will

be addressed in this chapter.

What do the footnotes in these two translations say about nationalism as a theme in Ulysses,

or at least in these two translations of it?

Pro-National Examples

Despite the fact that Joyce would not identify himself or his work as being nationalist in

any sense and especially not in the Irish tradition, the framing of ostensible nationalist themes,

symbols and individuals are often either pro-nationalist or anti-antinationalist. The examples in

this section are here because they reflect positively on the Irish nationalist movement. Whether

or not those references that appear pro-nationalist are actually intended to demonstrate the

author’s partial or complete acceptance of the movement is irrelevant in this situation; what is

important is how the translators perceive and relay information about them.

Example 1:

“Crouching by a patient cow at daybreak in the lush field, a witch on her

toadstool, her wrinkled fingers quick at the squirting dugs. They lowed

about her whom they knew, dewsilky cattle. Silk of the kine and poor old

woman, names given her in old times. A wandering crone, lowly form of

an immortal serving her conqueror and her gay betrayer, their common

cuckquean, a messenger from the secret morning.”

Silk of the kine and poor old woman

are both names given to Ireland, used and created

by the Irish literary revival to personify Ireland in their texts. This is a partial description of the

old milkmaid who visits the Martello tower apartment each morning, bringing fresh dairy to

Stephen, Buck Mulligan, and Haines. She is discussed almost entirely in terms of the poor old

woman, although in the text it is specifically stated that not only does she not speak Irish, she

does not recognize it when Haines—the Englishman—attempts to hold a conversation with

her.

Both Róisín Dubh and the poor old lady are considered as personifications of Ireland, much

as Uncle Sam is the personification of the United States. The two women listed above are not

empty objects made symbol by association; Róisín Dubh is the dark bud waiting to burst into

bloom, and the poor old lady is a poor old lady put out of her house by strangers, who have

taken her beautiful four green fields

from her. They are, in other words, themselves Ireland,

although Joyce chooses to subvert the archetype of the poor old woman in order to mock the

writers of the Irish Literary Revival, who like Ireland/the poor old woman, would not

recognize Irish if it were being spoken to them. He stretches the irony even further when it is

an Englishman speaking to her in her own ‘native’ tongue.

Footnote from Jin Translation

“‘牛中魁首’指爱尔兰牛，因软草丰盈而特别壮美，爱尔兰文学中曾以此象

征爱尔兰。‘穷老太婆’也是神话中的爱尔兰的形象，但是她在真正的爱国志

士面前的形象是妙龄美女。一说爱尔兰文学过去以这些形象代表爱尔兰，

是因为英帝国统治者禁止提到爱尔兰。”

(‘Chief of the cows’ refers to Irish cows, because the soft grass is very nutritious

and beautiful. In Irish literature, this was once used to symbolize Ireland. ‘The

poor old woman’ is also a mythical image of Ireland, but before the eyes of

legitimate, noble-minded patriots, her image is that of a beautiful young

woman

. Another interpretation is that in the past Irish literature used these

symbols to represent Ireland because the ruling English empire forbade

mentioning Ireland.

)

This annotation to one of the most overt references to turn-of-the century Irish nationalism

is interesting for two reasons. First, Jin’s description of ‘Ireland’ focuses on the fact that the

grass is ‘soft’, ‘beautiful’, and ‘nutritious’, all apt adjectives for the land in question, but also

applicable to the grass of other countries. The same is true of his selection of words to describe

the word ‘patriots.’ Even though his interpretation of the poor old woman was the same as the

revivalists’, he states it as his own position. He also uses the words ‘noble-minded’ to modify

the word ‘patriot’. In Joyce’s time and earlier, the ‘legitimate’ patriots were those willing to go

to war for Ireland, but not in a noble-minded way. Their noble ideal not withstanding, those

“noble-minded patriots” were terrorists, people willing to blow up the English and any

civilians that got in their way in order to achieve their goal of freedom from the oppressor. Yet

Jin either ignores the fact of violence completely, or glorifies it.

Second, Jin’s claim that the use of the name ‘Ireland’ was prohibited is unfounded. The

way he frames the fact distances him from it. He uses the word ‘yishuo’ for ‘one interpretation’,

which makes it clear that this theory is not his own. He also does not state whether or not he

agrees with the theory, but his decision to include it in the annotation suggests at least a

willingness to accept it as fact: the phrase‘yishuo’explicitly states that it is ‘one’ interpretation,

and therefore there must be several others that he was aware of. His willingness to believe that

the English imperialist regime would resort to such extreme measures probably stems from his

own experience, since parts of China itself have at various times in the last two centuries been

under the rule of England, Germany, France, Russia, and Japan.

What this footnote suggests is that Jin identifies with the idea of anti-imperialism and is

perhaps in favor of violence in order to attain independence. It also suggests that Jin does not

differentiate between types of nationalism as Joyce did, so that ‘noble-minded patriots’ and

‘terrorists’ are actually ostensibly equitable. Or, if he does make a distinction, he is not on

Joyce’s ‘side’ per say, instead siding with the patriots, or at least not criticizing their methods.

Footnote from Xiao-Wen Translation

“毛皮像绢丝般的牛，最漂亮的牛和贫穷的老妪均为爱尔兰古称。”

(Dewsilky cattle, silk of the kine, and the poor old lady are all ancient names

for Ireland.)

Dewsilky cattle is a reconcstruction of ‘silk of the kine’, and all three names are not ancient,

but rather names invented during the nineteenth and twentieth century for inflammatory

purposes. Based on the sheer volume of annotations, there is no reason to doubt

that Xiao

and Wen are aware of the origins of these names, although it is possible that they were

misinformed of facts and did not look into the matter themselves. The assumption of age is

important to notice because it factors significantly into the Xiao-Wen understanding, which is

presented in a more understated way.

Instead of choosing to embellish the truth of the imperialist situation in Ireland, which

would suggest a general identification with any nation facing oppression from an outside

power, the Xiao-Wen translation emphasizes the truth and legitimacy of the Irish nationalist

movement. It does so by extending the movement’s history with the word ‘ancient’ and thereby

establishing roots upon which the nationalists can stand in the mind of the Chinese reader,

which simultaneously defuses the power of the British empire. This is a shade different from

anti-imperialism; it is a strong affiliation with the Irish, and a recognition of the Irish sovereign

power rather than a direct denial of the oppressor. It does not deny the oppressor but the

oppressor’s right to exist at all: clearly the Irish and their desire for self-sovereignty came first

if the poor old lady is an ancient name for Ireland.

This is problematic, because the reason the poor old lady became a symbol of Ireland is

because the English invaded Ireland and confiscated her land, thus reducing mother Ireland to

an old woman whose beautiful green fields are inhabited by strangers. It is, of course, also

possible that Xiao and Wen were trying to emphasize the length of oppression by stating that

these phrases are all ancient names for Ireland, which is correct in the fact that by Joyce’s time,

Ireland had been under foreign sovereignty for nearly eight centuries. However, if this is the

case it is also a gross oversight on the part of the translators, because it makes the English out

to be more evil than they were, since occupation of Ireland did not rest solely in their hands. If

this was the goal of the Xiao-Wen translation, then it follows the same logic as the Jin

translation, in that the translators were exaggerating the degree of oppression by the English.

Example 2:

“Where are our missing twenty millions of Irish should be here today instead

of four, our lost tribes?”

“We thank you from our heart, John, for this right royal welcome to green

Erin, the promised land of our common ancestors.”

Both of the above quotes speak of Ireland in terms of Canaan, making an outright and

unabashed connection rather than mere comparison. Ireland is Canaan, Canaan is Ireland.

The “lost tribes,” referring to the lost tribes of Israel—the nation without a home, and the

“promised land” of Canaan—are both now Irish, as perhaps they were always; Ireland lost

her most fertile and mythologically rich province to the English, and the country was

pseudo-permanently divided, while the famine drove millions of desperate Irish citizens to

emigrate and never return.

Also germane are the connections the rabble at Barney Kiernan’s draw between Irish

militant nationalism and Jewish nationalism, in this case Hungarian-Jewish—also militant.

The rabble themselves are keen on making that same connection, gossiping that it was the

Hungarians that created the cell system of terrorism

and that it was Bloom himself that

leaked that particular blueprint to the Irish paramilitaries. In the same episode of the text,

when asked what nation he belongs to, Bloom answers that he is Irish, thus literally uniting

militant Hungarian Jew and militant republican Irishman into one being.

(No footnote from Jin)

Footnote from Xiao-Wen Translation

“这里把爱尔兰比作迦南（应许给以色列人的土地）。”

(Here Ireland is being compared to Canaan [the promised land of the Israelites].)

If this were a footnote in any western-language translation of Ulysses there would be no

issue whatsoever in the information’s presentation, because the story of Canaan is not only

extremely well known but also a frequently used literary trope. However; given that this is a

Chinese translation, whether or not this is enough information to get the seriousness of the

reference across is unclear; the very fact of the parenthetical information’s existence seems to

point to the contrary. There are other brief mentions of Canaan in the footnotes of the

Xiao-Wen translation, but they are equally as shallow.

In terms of the Israel/Palestine conflict, while China is and has been calling for a

two-state solution, it has also notably favored Palestine. For example, in 1975 China

stalwartly supported a United Nations resolution which made Zionism a form of racism, and

when the resolution was rescinded China did not partake in the voting. Three years later,

when Mao’s regime ended and Deng Xiaoping took control, he curtailed Chinese support for

militant Palestinian groups, but still officially recognized the state of Palestine just five days

after it declared independence in 1988. In 1991, Chinese involvement in the conflict was

more limited, but China still voted to give Palestine more rights at the UN. More recently, in

2006, China refused to call Hamas a terrorist organization, despite its militant nature.

Thus a representation of Ireland as Canaan is a conflict of interests and a conundrum in

the mindset of Chinese citizens. In the translators’ frame of reference, the Palestinian cause

resonates strongly with the Irish one; and the militant Zionism of the Hungarian-Jews (i.e.

Bloom), which China categorized as racism, is understood and condemned as the activity of

ethnic extremists.

Example 3:

“Who…drive…Fergus now

And pierce…wood’s woven shade…?”

“…shadows…the woods

…white breast…dim sea.”

These groups of words are partial lines taken from William Butler Yeats’ poem, “Who

Goes with Fergus?” The poem explores the dichotomy between thought and action, and

wonders who will ride out with Fergus. Fergus was a mythological warrior of great renown

that was selected to lead the charge against Ulster and Cú Chulainn, and so in a way might be

construed as the true Irish hero, although perhaps that is not true in light of the fact that he

yielded to Cú Chulainn in battle.

The poem is a call to action; though Yeats himself would not act, it was an uncomfortable

inaction that fit him like a shirt too small through the shoulders; he was always attempting to

relieve the discomfort.

The lines as spoken in Ulysses are mumbled by Stephen as he

recovers from a blow to the face, just after two streetwalking English privates named

Compton and Carr gang up to get a rise from him. The response of the young Irishman, at last

defeated by the English, regrets his inaction and asks who now will save Ireland.

Footnote from Jin Translation

典出《谁与佛格斯同去》，有关诗句为：“谁愿和弗格斯去一固驾车，/

深深地刺透树林的浓荫？/……/他统治着树林的深处，/统治者朦胧海洋

的白色酥胸。”

(This is an allusion to “Who Goes with Fergus?.” The full lines are, “Who

will go drive with Fergus now,/ And pierce the deep wood's woven

shade,/……/ And rules the shadows of the wood,/ And the white breast of

the dim sea.”)

This is linked to an earlier footnote in the text explaining that W. B. Yeats wrote the poem,

“Who Goes With Fergus?” originally as a song in his play “The Countess Cathleen.” He then

goes on to say that Joyce once praised the song as the world’s most beautiful lyric poem.

Footnotes from Xiao-Wen Translation

“这是《谁与佛格斯同去》一诗头两行的片段。全句为：“而今谁与佛格斯

一道，骑车穿过密林织成的树林？”

(These are parts of the first two lines of “Who Goes with Fergus?.” The full

lines are, “Who will go drive with Fergus now,/ And pierce the deep wood's

woven shade?”)

“这是《谁与佛格斯同去》一诗第 10 行和第 11 行的片段。全句为：“他不

管辖树林的阴影，混沌的海洋露出雪白的胸脯。”

(These are the tenth and eleventh lines of “Who Goes with Fergus?.” The full

lines are, “And rules the shadows of the wood,/ And the white breast of the

dim sea.”)

The Xiao-Wen footnotes are also linked to an earlier footnote in the text, saying that the

lines are from the poem “Who Goes With Fergus?” by William Butler Yeats. The same note

also explains that it is rumored that the Irish Fergus emigrated and became the first king of

Scotland.

Cú Chulainn and Fergus were mythical champions selected to battle each other, each

symbolically tied to the land: Cú Chulainn for Ulster and Fergus for the rest of Ireland, again

another microcosm of civil war—and ethnic discord. Just before he is attacked, Stephen calls

himself a patriot, but only in re loyalty to the English crown. He refuses to revoke his insult

to the king, which is the reason Private Carr hits him. It is at this very moment that it is clear

that Stephen (Joyce) would rather ally himself with Ireland and everything that entails, than

with the north and the throne. It is also clear that, despite all of the satirization of nationalist

types in previous scenes, Joyce cannot escape the fact that neutrality is not a viable option.

He must act either the poet or the terrorist or both, and Stephen becomes the satirized

nationalist type: he tries to fight but gets knocked down, he tries to recite poetry but can only

remember parts. The nationalist is impotent.

Perhaps it is also the moment of realization for the translators. It is suddenly apparent that

the geographical and ethnic divisions historically created in Ireland makes anti-imperialism a

matter of inner-Ireland ethnic separatism. More importantly, this piecemeal poetic recitation

undermines the patriot (Stephen), rendering him powerless in the face of his enemy, the

imperialist. What good is it, Joyce asks, to have control over words or weapons if you cannot

put them to good use because of meekness—or in the case of Ireland, size?

This construction of nationalism is directly antithetical to the outlook of all three

translators, at least as far as their annotations suggest; they frame references to

anti-imperialist violence and sentiment as praiseworthy, no matter how unsuccessful. Often

the references made in Ulysses are subversive and intended to be critical of such sentiment.

The structural format of annotation allows the translator to provide a different subtext, by

secluding selected pieces of evidence and offering what may be partial or uninformed

information.

Neither of these footnotes does justice to the nationalist requirement of the lyric itself, nor

explains the important mythology of Fergus, nor the significance of the lyric’s placement in

the text. Surely the fact that non-violent, anti-Ireland Stephen

mutters this call to arms on

behalf of republicans could be construed as a first sign of his surrender to the inevitable

instinct to protect that to which one was born. Either that, or it is Stephen crowning himself

champion for Ireland. If he cannot stand against the English for old Erin, then there is no one

who can. Others, like Buck Mulligan with his plan for “Hellenizing” the island might try, but

they will not succeed. Yet the translators did not choose to present the information in that

way.

One possible explanation is that the ironic placement of the deconstructed poem is too

subtle a reference for the translators to interpret, but this explanation cannot be supported

either way. Another related explanation would be that the translators are unaware of the

differentiation between types of nationalism, as an institution as opposed to Joyce’s own

understanding of the word. Yet if this was actually the case, then such references as the

Jacob’s biscuit tin, Yeats’ poem, and Ireland as Canaan would not go unremarked on, because

they are all incidents aligned with Chinese nationalism: the nation as a whole, unified against

ethnic separatism and against imperialism.

In this instance and throughout the footnotes, the most likely explanation for the silence

of the translators on certain subjects is that they have no conscious agenda to portray these

incidents of nationalistically-charged phenomena as either commendable or deplorable; rather,

the translators are products of the environment they live in, and ideas of a nation united with

itself would be celebrated whereas ideas of nation divided against itself would be

misunderstood and dangerous. The translators’ own experiences of colonialism in China

would naturally put them in opposition to the imperialism of the British Empire, while

anti-nationalist dissidence from known scholars like Joyce would be so far beyond their ken

that they would likely not notice it, which is the most plausible reason for the significance of

Yeats’ poem going unexplained.

Anti-National Examples

Just as with the examples above, it is not necessarily the case that these are actually

intended as negative examples of nationalist sentiment. But because characters such as the

Citizen reflect negatively on the nationalist cause as represented in Ulysses, and because Joyce

is known for his aversion to violence, there is certainly a precedent for understanding the text

as standing in opposition to nationalism. How does the information provided in the annotations

represent these iterations of rendering the romanticization of Ireland’s nationalist movement as

absurd?

Example 4:

“Gaptoothed Kathleen, her four beautiful green fields, the stranger in her house.”

Kathleen, gaptoothed or otherwise, is a reference to the short drama written by Yeats and

Lady Augusta Gregory for the Abby Theatre during the Irish Literary Revival titled “Cathleen

Ní Houlihan.” Cathleen is the original manifestation of the Sean-Bhean bhocht archetype,

better known as the poor old woman. As previously noted, the four green fields are the four

provinces of Ireland, the stranger in the house is England, and Cathleen is the personification

of Ireland come knocking for justice. The potential of Cathleen is magnified in this example

because of the explicit, straightforward placement of her with the fields and the strangers.

References to Kathleen in Joyce are in large part intended more as criticism of the Literary

Revival than anything else. The movement sought to restore Irish-Celtic culture to Ireland, but

the culture and myths it returned were generally inventions of the artists rather than historically

accurate. Kathleen, or the poor old woman, is perhaps the best example of such, and Joyce

highlighted her as a beacon of hypocrisy: the Revivalists were no different from the English,

trying to impose a foreign culture on the native population, and Kathleen herself is a stranger

in the house.

Footnote from Jin Translation

“凯慧琳为爱尔兰神话中女王，在叶芝剧本《胡里痕的凯慧琳》（1902）中

以缺牙老妪形象出现，四块绿田之古爱尔兰四省，外人之英帝国。”

(Kathleen is a mythical Irish queen, and in Yeats’ play “Cathleen Ní Houlihan”

(1902) she appears in her gap-toothed poor old woman form. The four green

fields are the four ancient provinces of Ireland, and the stranger the British

empire.)

The description of Kathleen as ‘mythical’ and a ‘queen’ dates the translation. It wasn’t

until the latter half of the twentieth century that critics of Yeats’ work begin to consider the

poor old lady in terms of her mythical potentiality. Much of the ensuing literary discussion

focused on Cathleen as a national sacrificial myth, drawing on both pagan and Christian

rejuvenation sacrifices, as well as the long history of martyrs for the Irish cause.

Here, the reference to Kathleen as a myth demonstrates a tendency to justify relatively

modern agitation through invocation of the distant past.

Footnote from Xiao-Wen Translation

“在叶芝的剧本《豁牙子凯思林》中，凯思林这个贫穷的老妪象征着失去自

由的爱尔兰。她说她那四片美丽的绿野（指爱尔兰的四省，阿尔斯特，伦

斯特，芒斯特，康诺特）都被夺走了。‘家里的陌生人’指英国入侵者。”

(In Yeats’ play “Cathleen Ní Houlihan

,” the poor old woman Cathleen

symbolizes an Ireland that has lost its freedom. She says her four beautiful

green fields [meaning the four provinces of Ireland, Ulster, Leinster, Munster,

and Connacht] have all been snatched away. ‘The stranger in her house’ refers to

the English intruders.)

The original quotation cited above is an unbiased set of images, yet this annotation to

those images qualifies them with the words ‘snatched’ and ‘intruders’. ‘Snatched’ is a brutal

and underhanded way to take something from someone, just as the word ‘intruder’ is a very

pointed and disparaging description of a stranger. What these strong words entail is an

identification with the Irish hatred of their oppressor. Ostensibly, this grows out of Xiao’s

own life experience: when he was teaching at the School of Oriental and Asian Studies in

London, he became an active member of the China Campaign Committee, which opposed the

Japanese occupation of China. The hostility of the words ‘snatched’ and ‘intruders’ is also

indicative of a tolerance for violence in defense of the nation.

Example 5:

“Potato I have.”

This is a thought that passes through Leopold Bloom’s mind as he leaves the house on

Eccles Street, and it refers to the shriveled black potato he carries with him as a lucky talisman.

It was a gift—an heirloom—from his mother, and he doesn’t go anywhere without it. It is

ironic that ‘an heirloom’ potato is considered a lucky charm, particularly because Bloom

considers himself an Irishman born and bred, and because the Great Famine

is the biggest

disaster in Irish history. The diseased heirloom potatoes were a huge factor in the historic

potato famine that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands and forced millions more

people to emigrate from home and heritage. The fact that his mother gave it to him is indicative

of Joyce’s own feelings about Ireland, as Stephen said in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,

“Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.”

(No footnote from Jin)

Footnote from Xiao-Wen Translation

“土豆是布鲁姆亡母的纪念品。他总把它当做护身符，随身携带。”

(The potato is a memento of Bloom’s dead mother. He considers it a talisman

and carries it with him everywhere.)

Since the famine is the defining moment of Irish history in reference to Ireland from the

outside (Western) perspective, it seems remarkable that in this annotation to Bloom’s potato

that neither Jin nor Xiao-Wen identified it. That it is kept in memoriam of his mother is

secondary to the irony of an heirloom potato being worshipped as auspicious by a man who

purports to belong to the nation whose population was reduced by half because of potatoes.

Example 6:

“You think me an old fogey and an old tory, his thoughtful voice said. I saw

three generations since O’Connell’s time. I remember the famine in ’46. Do

you know that the orange lodges agitated for repeal of the union twenty

years before O’Connell did or before the prelates of your communion

denounced him as a demagogue? You fenians forget some things.”

These lines, spoken by Mr. Deasy to Stephen, are representative of the kind of long-winded

and severely misinformed tirades that characterize him. While the reader can suppose that

Deasy is old enough to remember at least vaguely both the “famine in ‘46” and Daniel

O’Connell, the details of this speech are twisted to suit his own conscience. In fact, the Orange

Order as an institution never lodged for repeal of the Act of Union, although there were a

number of members that individually resented it. Secondly, he himself summarily denounces

O’Connell, The Liberator of Ireland, while simultaneously claiming that the Catholic Church

did the same, at the same distinguishing between himself and Catholics. Then, further proving

his ignorance, he lays blame on the Fenians for misremembered history and calls Stephen a

Fenian.

It is not that Deasy necessarily believes that Stephen specifically is a Fenian, more that he

slots a larger group of individuals into that category, in this case all Catholics. By no stretch of

the imagination is that a true statement, nor would it be if only considered in context of

Stephen, who—like Hamlet—feels that the motherland is a prison.

Why is Deasy characterized this way?

Quite simply put, as a person, Mr. Deasy is a Northerner and an Ulsterite. For whatever

reason, all Northern Irish characters in Joyce’s work receive similar treatment, usually paired

with derogatory descriptors of their voices, if nothing else. For example, in Stephen Hero, it is

written of one character, “He spoke in a high-pitched voice and with a cutting Northern

accent.”

The reader knows Mr. Deasy is an Ulsterite not only due to his distinctions between

himself and Stephen through the word ‘you’, but also because he himself makes it very evident;

at the very end of the second episode, Deasy sings, “For Ulster will fight/And Ulster will be

right.”

Footnote from Jin Translation:

There are actually five footnotes appended to this paragraph: one gives a brief history of

Daniel O’Connell, one explains the famine, one explains the Orange Order and its agitation to

repeal the act of Union, the fourth note explains that all Catholics admired O’Connell and that

none of them—no matter how disillusioned with his policies—would have given him the title

of ‘demagogue’, and the fifth note addresses Stephen and the Fenians.

What are the possible reasons for including a footnote that states that the Orange Order

lobbied for the repeal of the Union of 1800, which never happened on an institutional level?

There is a straightforward reason for this, and that is simply that if the Orange Order had done

so, it would imply a common goal between the ‘orange’ Irish and the ‘green’ Irish: to keep the

republican movement in parliament separate from the Westminster parliament. In the footnote,

Jin does mention the fact that one of the founding principles of the Orange Order was that it

did not want Ireland to separate from England; however, he does not provide the reason why

the Order did not want Irish parliament to be converged into Westminster. They inadvertently

ignore the fact that the reasons were different, which creates the illusion of ethnic unity, which

is an issue China is struggling with even today, with more and more minority groups jostling to

legally establish their differences from the Han majority.

But the final footnote, on Stephen and the Fenians, is the most striking. Appended to the

final sentence of the paragraph, it reads,

“分尼亚协会”是一个爱尔兰民族主义组织，主张通过武装暴动脱离英国。

该组织成立于一八五八年，最活跃的时期是十九世纪六十年代，至七十年

代后逐渐消亡。斯蒂芬当然不可能是这一组织的成员。

(The “Fenians” were an Irish nationalist organization, which used and promoted

primarily militaristic force to separate from England. It was founded in 1858

and was most active from the 1860s to the 1870s, when it slowly died out. Of

course Stephen could not be a member.)

In the other footnotes amending Deasy’s misinformation, there is also a sense of correction

to be gleaned from certain emphatic grammar structures that carry slightly negative

connotations, although Jin never outright says that Deasy is incorrect. Instead information is

provided directly contradicting Deasy’s argument with facts. The footnote above uses the

phrases “dangran” (of course) and “bu keneng” (not possible) to negate Deasy’s all-inclusive

use of “you Fenians” and demonstrate that the idea that Stephen could be a Fenian is ludicrous.

Likewise, in one of the earlier comments on this paragraph, the phrase “bing meiyou

ren……”

was used to qualify the statement that no Irish Catholic of the time would have

called O’Connell a demagogue, “bing” being an emphatic structure applied to negative

statements that implies a tinge of ‘naturally’ or ‘of course’.

The leap from the society’s active dates to the statement that Stephen was not a member

suggests a correlation between the two; that due to the dates Stephen could not have been a

member. The fact that it is not the idea of ‘militaristic force’ that prevents him from being a

member confirms that Jin does not perceive differences in types of nationalism. Perhaps this is

because historically in China the only way to attain the ideal of self-sovereignty was by means

of violence, or perhaps it is simply societal conditioning that allows for the use of violence to

protect the motherland.

Footnote from Xiao-Wen Translation

Like the Jin translation, the Xiao-Wen collaboration provided several footnotes for this

paragraph. There is one about Daniel O’Connell, one briefly mentioning the potato famine, one

explaining the Orange Order and their reasons for agitation against the Union, and a fourth

note explaining the Fenians. Interesting to consider is the fact that the note touching on

O’Connell goes into great depth on his agenda and makes him appear to be a demagogue, as

accused, although it also does clarify that in reality it was the English government that labeled

him as such.

The fourth footnote, which describes the Fenians, also goes into specifics on the foundation

and active dates of the society, although it adds a detail that Jin missed; that the Fenians were a

race of people that long ago conquered and lived in Ireland. The end of the fourth note touches

on the issue of Stephen, and says,

这里，迪希把芬尼社社员一词作为激进的共和党人的俗称来用的。

(Here, Deasy refers to Stephen as a Fenian, vernacular slang for members of the

radical rebulican party.)

In this particular fragment of the footnote, Xiao and Wen do detract from the notion that

Stephen was a Fenian, but replace one absurd notion with another by allowing Deasy to

say—not inaccurately, in terms of slang at least—that Stephen is militantly nationalistic; the

former neither Stephen nor Joyce would have allowed himself to be called and the latter

perhaps even less so.

It is difficult to surmise what Xiao and Wen intended from this footnote, especially since

they do not define what they mean by ‘radical republican party’ and who specifically the party

opposed. If Xiao-Wen had made such a statement, it would have shown their position on the

movement, whether it was opposed to imperialism, ethnic separatism, or both. In this case no

allegiance was specified.

In neither instance is there any hint that something about Deasy is not quite right, other

than his grasp of history. The fact that such a representation of Northerners is commonplace

and suggestive in Joyce’s work is not mentioned. Even though both translations show an

understanding that Deasy has an inaccurate grasp of history, neither translation elaborates on

this characterization. It might be said that they understate the inaccuracies by not explicitly

stating that he is wrong, which suggests that the insinuation of ethnic separatism was

something culturally alien or taboo to the period of translation.

Example 7:

“Seabloom, greaseabloom viewed last words. Softly. When my country takes her

place among.

Prrprr.

Must be the bur.

Fff! Oo. Rrpr.

Nations of the earth. No-one behind. She’s passed. Then and not till then. Tram

kran kran kran. Good oppor. Coming. Krandlkrankran. I’m sure it’s the

burgund. Yes. One, two. Let my epitaph be. Kraaaaaa. Written. I have.

Pprrpffrrppffff.

Done.”

Both the Jin and the Xiao-Wen translations provide a translation and acknowledgement of

this portion of Robert Emmet’s speech from the docks just before his execution for his part in

the abortive rebellion against British rule in 1803. The full text of these lines reads,

Let no man write my epitaph: for as no man who knows my motives dare now

vindicate them, let not prejudice or ignorance asperse them. Let them and me

repose in obscurity and peace, and my tomb remain uninscribed, until other

times, and other men, can do justice to my character; when my country takes

her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph

be written. I have done.

These words are some of the most memorable and famous words ever spoken by an Irishman.

In the original text of Ulysses as seen above, Bloom stands reading them from a flyer posted on

a wall, passing gas at the most overt Ireland-loving discourse. His actions suggest that either he

does not identify with the martyrdom of the famous nationalist or that he disapproves of the

cause itself, or both. Irish he may be, but a patriot Leopold Bloom is not, an idea reinforced by

encounters with the Citizen in the following episode.

A closer examination of Robert Emmett will reveal that he is not much of a hero: he led

two failed rebellions against British colonial rule, the second of which he tried to stop almost

as soon as it had begun because he saw blood spilled for the first time and did not wish to see

more shed. It is tempting to assume that it is due to his weakness as a revolutionary that neither

translation places any import on Robert Emmett, especially after the earlier suggestions of

compatriotism with the Irish cause, but that is only one possibility. Another interpretation is

that the irony and subversion of the moment is so blunt, and that the bodily humor is so

universal, that a footnote was not necessary to relay Joyce’s ambivalence towards the martyr

and his dying words.

The Xiao-Wen footnote explains the disruptions to the speech as Bloom trying to hide the

sound of his flatulence beneath the sound of the passing tram.

Example 8:

“Lamh Dearg Abu, he drank to the undoing of his foes, a race of mighty

valorous heroes, rulers of the waves, who sit on thrones of alabaster silent

as the deathless gods.”

“Lamh Dear Abu” is Irish for “Red hand to victory!” It is an old battle cry, based on the

story of two chieftains fighting for kingship of Ulster. A race would be held, and whoever

crossed the line first would take power. When one of the men saw he would lose the race, he

cut off his hand and threw it across the finish line, thus winning the race and control of the

province. Ever since, the Red Hand of Ulster has been a signifier of the province. In Joyce’s

time, during the year that Ulysses was published, 1922, the Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921) put

partition into effect and Northern Ireland was separated from the Republic and made British.

What all that means is that when the Citizen utters the phrase, “Lamh dearg abu,” the

reader must understand that in context he is declaring himself as an Ulsterite. Much later, in

the 1970s—a fact which you will see neither translator mentions—the Red Hand

Commandos were founded. They were, and still are, a loyalist paramilitary group. The

Citizen goes on to decry against his enemies, who he describes as “a race of mighty valorous

heroes,” far from the disparagement the reader expects from the man capable of viciously

insulting Bloom for pointing out that Jesus was a Jew. To the Citizen, national identity is at

least as important as religious identity, if not more; so why when given the opportunity to

denigrate the English does he compliment them?

It may seem that I am making a mountain out of a mole hill with this example, but the

Citizen is truly the character the most devoted to Ireland, at least superficially. His habits and

patterns of speech are the most quintessentially Irish in that he frequently uses colloquialisms,

Irish words, Hiberno-English reconstructions of Irish grammar into English, et cetera. He is a

member of the Gaelic Athletic Association, which supported the originally Irish sports. He

talks like a seanchaí, or a famous Irish storyteller. He is described in terms of Cú Chulainn,

the great Irish hero of myth. Yet perhaps the fact that Cú Chulainn—also called the Hound of

Ulster—was an Ulsterman himself is more important than the reader originally thought.

Footnote from Jin Translation

“爱尔兰语：‘红手获胜！’，接红手为爱尔兰某些部落表示，亦为奥尔索普

啤酒商标。”

(Irish: ‘Red hand to victory!’, referring to the red hand that is the mark of

certain tribes, and is also the trademark of Allsopp brand ale.)

In earlier examples, I have begun to show the possibility that Jin’s annotations to Ulysses

intimate a sympathy towards the turn of the century Irish nationalist cause, probably because

of issues of imperialism in China during his lifetime. There have also been vague

vindications of militaristic force to overthrow the rule of the British empire within Ireland.

With Garret Deasy, the Ulsterite, there is the possibility of one annotation being either

misinformed or an expression of anti-sectarian sentiment, but the annotation above,

specifically the words ‘certain tribes’, is a patent confirmation that it was the latter.

‘Certain tribes’ is too vague a phrase for Jin not to have known which ‘certain’ groups

they were, in this case the O’Neill family and all individuals from the area known as Ulster.

This includes residents of the following nine counties: Cavan, Donegal, Monaghan, Antrim,

Armagh, Down, Fermanagh, Derry/Londonderry, and Tyrone. In other words, the Red Hand

of Ulster is a symbol that brings the issue of ‘ethnic’ separatism to the foreground of Ulysses,

and pushes the issue of anti-imperialism away.

As Joyce finished writing Ulysses and tried to market it for publication, Ireland was in a

state of civil war over the issue of British rule. The loyalists, the majority of which lived in

the northern counties (i.e. Ulster), wanted Ireland to remain a part of the empire, whereas the

nationalists wished all of Ireland to be its own sovereign nation. The geographical divide,

aligned neatly if not completely with the sectarian divide, was largely created in the

nineteenth century during the plantation period, when the English monarchy settled loyal

Englishmen and Scotsmen in the northern land, which had the most fertile soil for farming.

The original, primarily Catholic farmers and owners of the northern land were forced south,

creating the dichotomy of allegiances Ireland is still known for today: protestant/loyalist

versus Catholic/republican.

At the end of the twentieth century, especially in the early 90s, China, too, was plagued

by a series of separatist terrorist activities along border regions, mostly with Inner Mongolia,

Xinjiang, and Tibet. At the time, most of the activists were not lobbying for independence.

Instead, they were vying for religious freedom, economic policies that favor the local, and

opposing the One-Child Policy, as well as expressing concern over nuclear testing and

environmental issues. Beijing officials began to utilize the activity to promote Chinese

nationalism as a “unifying ideology.” There was no need for ethnic minorities to petition for

unique treatment, since they were also part of the national Chinese identity.

In this period of time, representations that reinforced ideas of ethnic separatism would not

only have been taboo, but the topic would have been a very controversial one that people

probably avoided. If that was indeed the case, then little wonder if ‘Ulster’ was replaced with

‘certain tribes’.

Footnote from Xiao-Wen Translation

“红手是爱尔兰古代省份阿尔斯特的标记。也是奥尼尔族的家微图案。奥尔索普

拍瓶装啤酒即以此图案作为商标。”

(The red hand is the insignia of Ireland’s ancient province of Ulster, and is also the

crest of the O’Neill

family. Because of this, Allsopp brand ale uses this picture for

their trademark.)

Since the Xiao-Wen and Jin translations were published within months of each other, and

therefore both emerged in the midst of ethnic separatist terrorism, why do Xiao and Wen

choose to include the very information that Jin found too dangerous?

It would be easy to assume that they felt some kind of affiliation to ethnic issues: a simple

internet search turns up the fact that Xiao’s family is Mongolian. Yet the same search also turns

up the fact that he attended a Christian missionary school, whereas above he is almost

laudatory concerning anti-imperialist sentiment. A second consideration of the annotation

suggests that maybe his Mongolian lineage is just misleading biographical information. Like

the Jin footnote, the annotation above does not include the violent history of the red hand, nor

does it include any kind of indication that Ulster is—in the minds of the more extreme

nationalists and loyalists—“ethnically” diverse.

Example 9:

“An illuminated scroll of ancient Irish vellum, the work of Irish artists,

was presented to the distinguished phenomenologist on behalf of a large

section of the community and was accompanied by the gift of a silver

casket, tastefully executed in the style of ancient Celtic ornament, a work

which reflects every credit on the makers, Messrs Jacob agus Jacob.”

Although certainly a small detail, the Jacob’s biscuit tin is significant. It is hurled at

Bloom by the Citizen at the close of the 12

episode, after Bloom has stated that Jesus was a

Jew. The tin misses Bloom completely.

Jacob’s Biscuit Factory, located in Dublin, was one of the four principle defensive bases

for the republican rebels during the Easter Uprising of 1916. It was one of two bases

where

there were known instances of rebels using paramilitary violence against citizens who were

attempting to depose them or in some way render them impotent, such as by destroying their

territorial barriers. This is precisely what Bloom is doing to the Citizen, or at least so the

Citizen believes, so he attacks the civilian—in this case, Bloom—using the greatest power he

knows; militant Irish nationalism.

Additionally, the Jacob’s factory was owned by Quakers, who are renowned for their

pacifism. By making an article of pacifist paraphernalia a bomb in open caricature of the

Easter 1916 uprising, Joyce is once again undermining the shared interests of the Literary

Revival and the uprising, displaying how absurd he considered the situation to be.

Footnote from Jin Translation

“雅各布公司为都柏林一饼干厂，agus 为爱尔兰语‘和’，表示厂名中两个

雅各布均为厂主。”

(Jacob’s is a Dublin-based biscuit factory, ‘agus’ is Irish for ‘and’,

representing the two Jacobs in the factory name.)

Footnote from Xiao-Wen Translation

“这是以都柏林饼干制造商W.雅各布与R.雅各布为老板的一家股份有限公

司。”

(This is a reference to Dublin’s joint stock company limited biscuit factory

owned by W. Jacob and R. Jacob.)

Much as with the Citizen’s alternate identity, the buried identity of the Jacob’s biscuit tin is

not acknowledged by either translation. The biscuit tin is a minute and very subtle detail in

comparison to the flagrantly Ulsterite declaration that the citizen made, which also went

unacknowledged in both. The translators’ silence about the Citizen’s loyalties is potentially

cultivated from the governmental hostility towards any kind of separatism. The official

reaction to separatist violence both in the 1990s and since 2008 has been to say that these acts

are committed by small extremist groups, and that the best way to prevent future attacks is

nationalism, which will theoretically unify the nation. That is what the government wants: a

populace focused on the fact of being Chinese rather than on the fact of their different

minorities. This idea of nationalism is also a justification of or reaction to anti-imperialism,

which fleshes out the potential explanations for the translators’ esteem of Irish proceedings

against the colonial force of the British Empire.

The Jacob’s Biscuit tin is not an ethnic separatist symbol, at least within the scope of

Ireland: it pits Ireland against the British Empire, and in 1916 the nation had yet to be legally

divided into two separate entities. So why is the historical and more importantly nationalistic

background of the biscuit tin unaddressed in both translations? There is a logical explanation.

Jacob’s Biscuit Factory, was, as previously stated, notorious for incidents of paramilitary

violence against civilians, although it should be said that the ‘civilians’ in questions were not

innocent bystanders: they were individuals that attempted to impede the revolutionaries. In

essence, a miniature civil war, which is inner-ethnic separatism.

Throughout the footnotes, the translators’ experiences and the mindset ingrained in them

during their formative years as Chinese citizens influences their presentation of material to

the audience. If Jin, Xiao and Wen understand the nationalism buried in Ulysses as purely

anti-imperialist, then that is how the reader will understand it, as guided by the information

provided. Since the translators are not keyed in to the separate nationalisms inherent in the

text, such as ethnic separatism and anti-imperialism, only the sentiment that the translators

can relate to is perceived and relayed.

The imperialists are the enemy of this monogenealogical mentality, but because of the

unified nature of it, the only group of people included in ‘imperialists’ are the British and

those who explicitly associate with them. At least up until this point, when there’s a question

of allegiance between internal groups, the translators give them the benefit of the doubt, such

as in the case of the Orange Order and, to some extent, Deasy. Likewise, when it comes down

to a question of militant sectarianism, as with Zionism and the Irish Republican Brotherhood,

those too go unexplored.

Yet perhaps this phenomenon is somehow due to the subtlety of the references, or a

perceived insignificance. But what about the different voices of the characters from different

“racial” backgrounds? Surely they should be more indicative of the translators’ awareness of

different types of nationalism and how attuned they are to the subtlety of the text.

CHAPTER 2

Potato Potahto: Two Translations of Ulysses

Translating the Voices of Segregated Politicized Ethnicities

“The language of the conqueror in the mouths of the conquered is the language of

slaves.”

In every country there are a multitude of different voices, varied in accent and in dialect. In

literature, these voices become archetypal of certain castes, geographies and so on. In English,

this prolificacy of voices includes such recognizable dialects

as Cockneys, Kiltartan, black

dialect, Scots, Chicano, Yinglish, Chinglish, as well as many other lesser-known forms.

Chinese easily has over 40 spoken dialects. Although many of them are not mutually

intelligible, nationalist linguists emphasize the fact that they are all derivative of Mandarin: a

fact which is crucial to understanding the Jin and Xiao-Wen translations.

In Ulysses as in Joyce’s other works, there is a gradient of ethnic voices, the most emphatic

discrepancy falling between the ‘pure’ Irish voices and the ‘pure’ English ones. The voices that

come between and therefore might be expected to be treated more mildly are those of the

Northern Irish and the Anglo-Irish, what we might call ‘hyphenated’ voices.

In Joyce’s esteem, the expected order of descent from ‘favored’ to ‘scorned’ ethnic voices

is Irish, Anglo-Irish, Northern Irish, English. This is because the Anglo-Irish, while technically

being mostly of English descent, were also comprised of Irish converts to Protestantism

(Church of Ireland) during the time of the Penal Laws, which stripped Catholics of their rights.

Also, in Joyce’s experience, the visible portion of the Anglo-Irish social class—while taking

their social cues from English practices—were heavily aligned with Irish nationalist sentiment.

More prominent individuals from this group from the turn of the twentieth century that Joyce

knew personally were Lady Augusta Gregory, William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw,

and John Millington Synge. They were all members of the Literary Revival, vying for the

return of Celtic culture.

The Northern Irish are allotted a lower rung because of their vastly British ethnic

composition. Because of the plantation period, the northern counties were predominantly

Protestant and Presbyterian in population, and the majority of citizens were also loyalist.

Unlike the Anglo-Irish, who only took their social cues from English custom, northerners were

English, or at least generally perceived as being so. And Joyce, aurally oriented as he was, was

repulsed by the high-pitched high-speed northern accents, a disgust which evolved into a

synecdoche-esque distrust of the individuals who spoke with it.

The aim of this chapter is to establish the spectrum of these ethnic voices in the original

text of Ulysses, and outline Joyce’s use of them in relation to the idea of nationalism. At the

same time, it will explore the textual representations of these different voices in the1994 Jin

and Xiao-Wen translations. Examples were carefully culled from the novel based upon my

understanding of the different characters’ ‘national’ identities, as well as based upon my

understanding of typical patterns of speech for all groups involved.

These ‘ethnic voices’ or this ‘nationalist language’ can also be discussed in terms of

Hiberno-English and the Joycean negative of that, the Queen’s English. In this examination of

nationalist language, the category of Hiberno-English voices includes the following aspects;

Anglicized Irish words, Irish words, and Irish grammar constructions. This is the most

important aspect of the chapter, because the Hiberno-English of Joyce is actually a

reconstruction of his otherwise deconstructed English throughout the rest of the text. It is a

defining moment of uniqueness in Ulysses, the facet that makes it a novel in English and yet

against English. It is also one of the most potent pro-nationalist arguments available to critics,

because of the sharp divisions drawn between the ex post facto Republic-of-Irelanders and the

English and ex post facto Northern Irelanders through this language created by Joyce.

The temptation will be for us to say that because English is such an etymologically

multicultural language that it is a good medium for representing several different ‘ethnicities’,

but that because written Chinese is an essentially monocultural language that it would be

difficult or even impossible to create different ethnic voices. This is an invalid argument for

two reasons. First, the linguistic category of Chinese contains over 40 dialects, and it would be

relatively easy for the translators to assign each Irish and English ethnicity a particular dialect

of Chinese, or at least aspects of them so that readers would understand that the language of

given characters is nonstandard and not uniform, as well as being intended to be understood in

certain ways. Second, Ulysses is built on a language that has been torn apart and reassembled

in piecemeal fashion, regardless of standardized grammatical and syntactical structures, and for

the translators of such a book to attempt to communicate that in the standardized form of any

language is impossible. The daringness of the language gave Ulysses the success it enjoys

today. Since the translators were already going to need to bend and break rules of original

linguistic structures, it would have been easy to create a few obviously vernacular and

disparate voices that the readers could understand.

First and foremost is the voice of the pure Irish, the purportedly most potently Irish

character being the Citizen, who is constantly mixing pure Irish words and phrases into his

sentences.

Example 1:

“Never better, a chara, says he.”

(my friend)

“Bi i dho husht, says he.”

(Be quiet/shut up)

“Sinn fein amhain!”

(We ourselves alone!)

It is interesting and relevant to note that even though the Citizen is the only character to really

use any pure Irish words in his daily conversations,

the kinds of Irish phrases that he makes

use of are elementary and common in usage. It seems unlikely that he knows Irish on any

higher level than just stray words picked up from grandparents or parents. Even the last one,

‘sinn fein amhain’, is just a political slogan probably often heard going around the taverns.

Thus Joyce maintains his image of the Citizen as inadequately Irish while simultaneously

making him the most quintessentially Irish citizen he possibly can.

From Jin Translation

“再好也没有，a chara, 他说。”

(Couldn’t be better, a chara, he said.)

The other two lines of Irish given above were maintained in their original form in the Jin

translation, and after each as with the example above, a footnote was given informing the

reader that the language is Irish and translating the Irish into Chinese. The only thing

noteworthy about this is that Jin failed to copy the original Irish “Bi i dho husht,” and instead

wrote, “Bii do ushsht.”

From Xiao-Wen Translation

“再好不过啦，我的朋友，”他说。

(“Couldn’t be better, my friend,” he said.)

“不许出声！”他说。

(“Be quiet!”)

“我们自己，”‘市民’说，“我们自己就够了！

”(“We ourselves,” the Citizen

said, “We ourselves alone!”)

Both the second and third notes are accompanied with footnotes explaining that they were

both originally phrases in Irish, the Sinn Fein note also explaining the origin of the words in

the work of D. D. Sullivan.

Unlike the Citizen, however, the rest of the cast use Anglicized Irish words; that is to say

Irish words and expressions that have been transliterated into English. (Italics added)

Example 2:

Bloom: “ignorant as a kish of brogues”

(cis- basket, and brog- shoe)

Narrator: “To the door of the bar and dining room came bald Pat, came

bothered Pat, came Pat, waiter of Ormond.”

(bodhar- deaf)

Simon Dedalus: “Ben machree…”

100

(mo chroidhe- my heart)

Molly: “…he used to amuse me the things he said with the half sloothering

smile on him…”

101

(sligheadoir- artful)

In this case, although Jin obviously understood the Anglicized Irish words because he

translated them correctly, he did not differentiate between those and the standard English

words. There is no indication in the language of his translations that there is something

different about particular words, nor does he annotate them. The only peculiarity is at the

phrase, “ignorant as a kish of brogues.” The Jin translation reads, “……大皮鞋似的字认不了

一筐……,”

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which translates roughly as ‘so ignorant that he doesn’t know a basket of words

the size of big leather shoes.” The second half of the phrase, “da…zi renbuliao yikuang,” is a

Chinese colloquialism equivalent to the original Irish. The same is also true of the Xiao-Wen

translation, except that the “kish of brogues” is accompanied by a footnote that says in the west

we say an idiot’s brain grows on their foot, and that the basket of shoes implies further

ignorance. Nowhere does it say, after all that effort, that the basket of shoes is an Irish

expression, or that it happens to be very similar to this Chinese expression.

Following that, the Hiberno-English is represented by a series of grammar structures

plucked directly from the Irish and transplanted into English. Chief among these is the ‘and +

present participle’ construction of a sentence.

Example 3:

“…and Alf trying to keep him from tumbling off the bloody stool… and he

talking all kinds of drivel…”

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From Jin Translation

“阿尔夫还得扶着他点儿，免得他从背时的凳子上翻下来……可他还在不

停嘴地胡址……”

104

(Alf still having to support him a little, to keep him from tumbling off the

unlucky stool…but he still talking all kinds of drivel…)

From Xiao-Wen Translation

“他差点儿从该死的凳子上倒……阿尔夫试图扶住他。他嘴里还喋喋不休

地说着种种蠢话……”

105

(He nearly falling off the bloody stool…. Alf trying to support him. He still

talking all kinds of drivel…)

In Chinese, there is no conjugation of verbs. All verbs exist in the infinitive and change

tenses based upon context. The conjunction ‘and’ is also rarely used, which makes any

attempt at representing this particular Hiberno-English construction difficult. I have

translated the verbs above into the present participle based on the English, but in Chinese this

would not be as anomalous a construction as it sounds in English. The ‘and’ in the original

English rearranges the stress on words, which the Chinese translations do not capture, nor do

the translations make a note to acknowledge it. It is also noteworthy that the phrase “diedie

buxiu” in the Xiao-Wen translation, which means ‘to witter on’, is a literary or educated

expression and is therefore inappropriate in this instance.

It feels as if the translators have fallen into the same trap that a lot of Joyce critics have in

the past; they assume that because Joyce was a pacifist and because he had ‘escaped’ from

Ireland that there is nothing to the Irish aspect of Ulysses other than Ireland being what Joyce

knew best at the time of writing. This is an illogical assumption given the careful attention

paid to the voices of the characters. For example, both Bloom and Stephen speak eloquently,

Stephen without any readable accent at all, and Bloom with only minor slips into a lilt. Yet

here the narrator of the twelfth episode, an unknown in company of the ‘quintessentially’

Irish Citizen in Barney Kiernan’s, speaks vernacularly in keeping with the rhythm of the rest

of the episode.

Other similar linguistic constructions borrowed from Irish are condescendingly put into

the mouths of the more undereducated and quaint characters, such as Simon Dedalus, Alf

Bergan, and Molly Bloom. (Italics added)

Alf Bergan: “Sure I’m after seeing him not five minutes ago, says Alf, as plain as a

pikestaff.”

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(‘Sure’ as an interjection, and the ‘after + present participle’ construction, meaning that

something has been done before the present action. For example, “I’m after seeing him”

means “I just saw him.”)

Molly: “…I wonder do they see anything that we cant staring like that when she sits at

the top of the stairs so long…”

107

(Use of ‘do’ in place of ‘if’)

Bloom: “What do they be thinking about?”

108

(Use of ‘do’ and non-conjugation of the verb form ‘be’ rather than ‘are’)

This category also includes Buck Mulligan’s mockery of it, mixing all the various structures

together into long, breathless sentences that seem unintelligible even to English readers.

Example 4:

“’Twas murmur we did for a gallus potion would rouse a friar, I’m thinking,

and he limp with leching. And we one hour and two hours and three hours

in Connery’s sitting civil waiting for pints apiece.

He waited:

And we to be there, mavrone, and you to be unbeknownst sending us your

conglomerations the way we to have our tongues out a yard long like the

drouthy clerics do be fainting for a pussful.”

109

Buck Mulligan rarely says or acts seriously except via satire and mockery, in this case the

lilting brogue he resorts to when pretending to be rural. Here, he is chastising Stephen for not

meeting them with money at the pub for pints. It is a petty complaint and Mulligan realizes

that, so he uses the voice he associates with pettiness, the vulgar one of the uneducated Irish

masses. More importantly, it is in the style of J. M. Synge’s writing; a combination of western

Irish grammar structures such as might be found on the Aran Islands mixed with English

language.

What is interesting about the translation of these particular lines is that there is a definite

sense of the translators attempting to surmount the obstacles of the ‘and + present participle’

construction, the issue of non-conjugation, the non-usage of the conjunction ‘and’, the use of

an ‘infinitive verb 1 + present participle verb 2’ construction (“and you to be… sending”),

and the ‘do + infinitive verb 1 + present participle verb 2’ construction (“do be fainting”).

This means that there is an awareness on the translators’ part that the English is non-standard.

The Xiao-Wen translation especially so, because it includes a footnote explaining that

‘mavrone’ was originally in Irish, although the Chinese “guaiguai” that the translators use is

actually more often used as an exclamation of surprise than as an endearment. It also then

goes on to explain that the language of these few lines is in the style of Synge, with his mix

of colloquial Irish grammar and English words.

For example, the Jin Translation uses the character ‘an’ for ‘I’ and ‘anmen’ for ‘we’ to

colloquialize the voice, ‘an’ being from a rural northern dialect, meaning ‘I/me/we/us’, and

that is the extent of his attempt to vulgarize Mulligan’s rant. But then he also uses this same

‘an’ later for the voices of the English soldiers, indicating that there are no layers of

vernacularism in the different voices, other than differentiation of social class.

In China as in every country there is a standard language and there are regional dialects.

Officially, dialects fall below Mandarin on the hierarchy of languages, but they are still

privileged by the speakers. The best example of this is Shanghainese. In Shanghai, speakers

of the local dialect are considered more educated than speakers of Mandarin. Northern

dialects, on the other hand, are considered not unlike the stereotypes of ‘redneck’ speech

patterns: crude, rustic and unsophisticated. It works in this instance precisely because Buck

Mulligan is mocking the Western Irish dialect as all of those things. The Xiao-Wen translation

also relies on this northern dialect to make Mulligan’s speech more vernacular.

From Xiao-Wen Translation

“我们曾嘟囔说，要足足的喝上它一杯，让行乞的修士都会起魔障。我正

转着这个念头，他呢，跟姑娘们黏糊起来了我们就乖乖儿地坐在康纳里那

儿，一个钟头，两个钟头，三个钟头地等下去，指望着每人喝上五六杯呢。”

他唉声叹气地说：

“我们就呆在那儿，乖乖，把舌头耷拉得一码长，活像那想酒想得发昏的

干嗓子教士。你呢，也不知道躲到哪儿去了，居然还给我们送来这么个玩

艺儿。”

110

(We once murmured, to drain a glass would rouse a begging friar. I’m thinking,

and he getting languid with the girls and we patiently sitting in Connery’s, one

hour, two hours, three hours waiting, wishing for pints a piece.

Sighingly, he said:

We just waiting there, mavrone, tongues hanging out a yard long, like parched

clerics fainting for a drink. And we not knowing where you were hiding, still

unexpectedly sending us your conglomerations.)

Xiao-Wen does not use ‘anmen’, instead varying the language alongside the

Hiberno-English, such as ‘wo zheng zhuanzhe zhege niantou’, which is a replication of one of

the present participle constructions: it actually says ‘I’m thinking’, with special emphasis

being placed on the time of the verb contextually through the word ‘zheng’, which means

‘just’ or ‘just now’. Another such correlation in the language of the text is at “do be fainting

for a pussful,” for which Xiao-Wen use the phrase ‘xiang de fahun’. It means to want

something so much that the subject is fainting/near fainting. Just like the “I’m thinking,”

rather than being colloquial, this expression is outmoded.

There are examples of colloquialism in these lines as well, using the same northern dialect

that Jin culled his ‘an’ from. In the first sentence, ‘qi mozhang’ is used to replace the word

‘rouse’ from the original. Usually ‘mozhang’ is a slang term for being addicted to something,

although in this case paired with the verb ‘qi’ or ‘to rise/give rise to’ it seems to have a

different meaning: to excite. In the following sentence, the phrase ‘nianhu qi’ for ‘limp’ is also

slang, for ‘languid’. And in the final sentence of the example, ‘wanyir’ is used for

‘conglomerations’. It is used to mean ‘souvenir’ or ‘trinket’, and also—even more

vulgarly—can be used as an insult to say, “What are you?,” implying a degree of monstrosity.

Here it is being used as a combination of meanings just as innovative as Joyce’s own language.

Other words from this passage also drawn from this same northern dialect include ‘dunang’

(murmur), ‘guaiguair’ (patiently), ‘guaiguai’ (mavrone) and ‘dala’ (drooping).

However, the language runs into snags at omission of the subject relative,

“Here’s this nobleman passed before.”

111

and at prepositions used in irregular ways taken from the Irish Gaelic usages

“Irish, Buck Mulligan said. Is there Gaelic on you?,”

112

where it cannot be adapted without butchering Chinese beyond recognition and then adding

footnotes to explain the debauchery. In general there is very little to distinguish the oddity of

the Hiberno-English from the ‘purity’ of the rest of the text. In itself this would not be a

problem, except that it is a distinct ethnic voice meant to be contrasted against the other

“British Isles” voices—the Northern Irish, the Anglo-Irish, and the English voices. The

instances of these voices in the text are few and far between, but when they do appear how

they speak rather than what they say is important.

The fact that the Irish voice comes across most clearly not with Molly or Alf or the Citizen

but with Buck Mulligan’s burlesque of it means something. It might mean that because

Mulligan’s words are the most absurdly and obviously deviating from the Queen’s English that

it was made that much easier to pick up on, even in translation. Or it might mean that, given

the perception of the Chinese language as one greater unified entity in spite of its dialectical

divergence, that the significance of variation in the dialects and accents of English-speaking

voices is lost on the translators. For example, someone in China who speaks Cantonese is still

perceived as being Chinese, whereas someone in Ireland speaking with a British accent is not

perceived as Irish.

The voice of the Anglo-Irish and the Protestant Ascendancy was also the voice of the Irish

Literary Revival. According to A. J. Bliss in his article on Anglo-Irish language and

literature,

113

malapropism is a particularly Anglo-Irish idiosyncrasy, and the twelfth episode

is rife with it. Although the Citizen is never guilty of malapropism, there is a high instance of

it in the speech of the people he surrounds himself with; Alf Bergan, the narrator, and Joe.

Example 5:

“I beg your parsnips, says Alf.”

114

(I beg your pardon.)

“They’re all barbers…”

115

(They’re all barbarians.)

“The bloody mongrel let a grouse out of him would give you the creeps.”

116

(The bloody mongrel let a bark…)

“Who made those allegations? Says Alf. “I, says Joe. I’m the alligator.”

117

(I’m the accuser.)

“Me, says Alf. Don’t cast your nasturtiums on my character.”

118

(Don’t cast your aspersions on my character.)

Like the Citizen saying the phrase ‘lamh dearg abu’, the prolificacy of malapropism in the

parlance of his entourage is very telling. It is another jibe at the Irish Literary Revival and

their nationalist tendencies. Again, the true-blue-Irishman, the Citizen who we now know to

be either an Ulsterite or ignorant of the cause he stands for, surrounds himself with others

claiming to be intense Irish nationalists, although perhaps not terrorists. Their idiom says

something different about them; that like the writers of the Renaissance, they are trying to

compensate for being genetically only half Irish by being ‘violently’ Irish in behavior,

although they are unable to eradicate their roots.

It was ironic to Joyce that those most insistent on reviving dead Irish culture were genetic

members of the Protestant Ascendancy, not members of the ‘native’ Catholic population that

could rightfully—if they desired—be opposed to the intrusion of the English and their

language. These self-revealing Ascendancy Citizen-ites in Barney Kiernan’s are a further

subversion of notions of ‘Irishness’ and nationalism.

These, too, are disregarded by the translators as unimportant or at least not critical to a

reading of Ulysses, translated directly into the phrases that they should have been in English,

without annotation. Is it an issue of subtlety, as the Jacob’s biscuit tin potentially is? Or is it

because the translators do not believe that differentiation between the voices is something

that should be emphasized? Or better yet, is it because this representation of an Anglo-Irish

speech pattern renders the subject unintelligent? The ‘purer’ Irish voices, like the Citizen’s,

are full of grammar structures that are not inherent to English, but the turns of phrase and

constructions are natural to a legitimate language—Irish—while the Anglo-Irish with their

malapropisms are manifestly incorrect, and Joyce’s use of such is intended to mock them, to

separate them from their compatriots.

These divisions on separate levels of language and identity are stereotypes that work

against their own countrymen and is, in effect, a milder form of ethnic separatism. As we

have seen before, ethnic separatism as an institution goes against the mindset of the Chinese

citizen, who believes in the legitimacy of sacrificing the personal for the greater good. This

notion, a remnant of the Mao era, has evolved into the less dramatic but equally as

self-sacrificing idea of the ethnic homogeny of the entire Chinese state, which manifests itself

in their treatment of Mandarin as one overarching structure that divides down into separate

dialects but that is always one. Yet with his characterization of hyphenated Irish voices, as we

see with both the Anglo-Irish and the Northern Irish, Joyce clearly demonstrates his

associations of genetic superiority with the ‘pure’ Irish, splitting English and even

Hiberno-English along “ethnic” divides, which offends the Chinese sensibility.

The next step down in the Joycean hierarchy is that of the Northern Irish. The best

example of a northern voice in Ulysses is Garrett Deasy, although since he is well-educated

his patterns of speech contrast very little with Stephen’s. Instead, his information—although

grounded in fact—is seldom accurate, and his long-winded rambles are both dry and tedious.

In other words, Mr. Deasy is unpleasant to be around. However, in the fifteenth episode there

is one very specific Northern speaker, actually called “The Orange Lodges,” referring to the

Orange Order, composed entirely of protestant loyalists to the English crown.

“You’ll be home the night!”

119

This particular usage of the article ‘the’ is a classically Northern Irish vernacularism, even

today. Its appearance at this juncture in the text is minor, but given that there are so few

Northern voices in the text, every instance of them is important, and any deviation from

Stephen’s educated English is intentional and meaningful.

120

Due to the fact that Chinese does not use the article ‘the’ or anything like it, it would have

been impossible for a translator to replicate this phrase. Unfortunately neither translation

comments on the anomaly, focusing on content rather than the form, which is one of the big

problems facing translators of Joyce.

But language is the hero of Ulysses, and the sense of Ulysses as a nationalist text is in

some ways defined by the voices of the minor characters. The voices discussed above, despite

being a subversion of Irishmen and having their linguistic foibles, are still the voices of Irish

characters. The defining moment of ethnic separatism versus anti-imperialism arrives with

the translation of the English voices, because Joyce is not as kind to the English, “the bloody

brutal Sassenachs and their patois.”

121

They, too, are thin on the ground, but reach their

pinnacle in Privates Carr and Compton, who pick a fight with Stephen at the end of the

fifteenth episode. Interestingly, it is during this interlude that the protagonist makes the one

and only proclamation that he is, in fact, an Irish patriot. After Bloom tries to defend him to

the privates as a gentleman, Stephen adds, “Gentleman, patriot, scholar and judge of

impostors.”

122

In fact, all of those are things that the young soldiers are not, quibbling over

Stephen insulting their king.

It is not their petty arguments that most defines their Englishness; it is their speech. One

glance at the dialogue is enough to see that something is going on.

Example 6:

Private Compton: “He doesn’t half want a thick ear, the blighter. Biff him

one, Harry.”

123

Private Carr: “I’ll do him in, so help me fucking Christ! I’ll wring the

bastard fucker’s bleeding blasted fucking windpipe!”

124

Private Compton’s language, if less vulgar, is still just as rough as Private Carr’s. Naturally,

it is only the latter that comes across as being crass in Chinese, because obscenity is

universally shocking.

From Jin Translation

“我来收拾他，操蛋基督助我！看我吧着操蛋杂种的倒毒操蛋臭气管拧断

了！”

125

(I’ll clean him up, so help me fucking Christ! I’ll wring the fucking bastard’s

unlucky fucking windpipe!)

From Xiao-Wen Translation

“我要干掉他，愿混蛋基督助我！我要扭断着混帐杂种的残暴该死混蛋的

气管。”

126

(I’ll dispose of him, so help me bleeding Christ ! I’ll wring the dirty bastard’s

cruel fucking bastard windpipe!)

In the Jin translation, the phrases ‘caodan jidu’ and ‘caodan’ for “fucking” both sound

extremely rude, and of course the word ‘caodan’ is extremely colloquial, and more importantly,

extremely offensive. In the Xiao-Wen translation, the word ‘hunzhang’ for “bastard” stands out as

the most offensive and vulgar, and might have origins in a rural dialect. It is not as offensive as

the ‘caodan’ that Jin uses. For example, an educated man might use the word ‘hunzhang’, but

never ‘caodan’. In Chinese as well as in English, the speaker of these sentences sounds

uneducated, violent, and low class. The speakers being soldiers, it is what the reader expects

anyway. Aside from Haines and a prostitute that steals Bloom’s lucky potato,

127

there are no

other significant English characters in Ulysses, which means Joyce chose the privates to

display England to its worst advantage, demonstrating disparagement and condescension more

than anything else. Additionally, the inclusion of the privates allows for what follows, which is

the ‘uneducated’ oppressor (Private Carr) unwarrantedly abusing (punching) the more ‘urbane’

oppressed (Stephen). It is, at least in terms of nationalism, the climax of the epic.

Here, as before, there is an understanding of the concept of anti-imperialism, and a

willingness to get behind the idea of typifying the person of the oppressor as a villain and an

uneducated blackguard. Joyce sets up layers of opposition with his different voices, but the

only voices that the reader can see are different in these two translations are the voices of the

‘pure’ (i.e. non-hyphenated) Irish as represented by Stephen, Bloom and the Citizen, and the

English as represented by Privates Compton and Carr. The ignominy of being one of the

hyphenated voices is lost in a perceived battle for justice. To the translators, ethnic separatism

is incomprehensible; to a degree, it is un-Chinese, and it is possible they never read it into the

text.

It is unfortunate that the different English voices of Ulysses were not given more attention

in these two translations, because they speak volumes about the intentions of the author. The

effects of the few more carefully translated instances prove that the task of duplicating the

different voices is not impossible. However, even if both translations had paid close attention

to the distinct ethnic voices it is still unlikely that the Chinese reader would have picked up any

of the defamatory undertones thereof. Without the annotation that neither the Jin nor the

Xiao-Wen translation provides in any of these instances, other than the one small aside when

Buck Mulligan is pretending to have a western Irish accent, the distinct voices of these separate

identities are lost.

All in all, there is no significant presence in either translation of a nationalist sub-language,

nor is there any momentous notational manipulation of nationalist references. However, silence

is as telling as speaking, and the very careful skirting of the subject is a kind of avoidance.

Indeed, some of the lines drawn by the translators were very fine. For example, the Jacob’s

biscuit tin that the Citizen lobs at Bloom in the twelfth episode. It is a heavily nationalist and,

more importantly, a heavily anti-imperialist symbol, and the incident that imbued the factory

with those qualities is a well-known, oft remembered event. Yet it went unremarked upon,

indicating a choice on the translators’ part not to include this information. Why? Somehow it

must go against the Chinese way of life and belief.

CHAPTER 3

An Irish Victory at Last: The Critics’ View of Ulysses

The Role of Nationalism in the Eyes of the Chinese Readership

“Some people, says Bloom, can see the mote in others’ eyes but they can’t see the

beam in their own.”

128

Having presented the reader with a detailed overview and interpretation of representations

of nationalism and national ethnic voices in the Xiao-Wen and Jin translations of James Joyce’s

Ulysses, I must now consider the reception of the translations by the intended audience. As

previously mentioned, both translations were eagerly received by Chinese readers. According

to Patrick O’Neill in his Polyglot Joyce: Fictions of Translation, the first printing of the

Xiao-Wen translation sold all 100,000 copies within a matter of days, and that despite the fact

that the cost of the book—$15—would have been the average weekly wage for the time. The

first printing of the Jin translation, the first volume of which was published just a few months

after the Xiao-Wen, sold out in a few weeks, and after the second volume was published in

1996, over 50,000 complete sets were purchased within six months.

129

With such a high demand for the novel, criticism and critical analyses were certain to

follow. Much of the criticism that came out immediately dealt with the quality of the

translations themselves rather than delving into the body of the text, but responses to the story

itself followed soon after, and this criticism is mostly focused on three aspects of the text:

stream-of-consciousness, feminism, and nationalism. It is this third that this chapter is

concerned with. How do the critics read nationalism in the text? Do they differentiate between

types of nationalism? Is there discussion of the opposing forces of ethnic separatism and

anti-colonialism? What passages stand out as important to the theme of nationalism in the mind

of Chinese readers? What does this mean for their understanding of nationalism, in contrast

with those of the author and the translators?

In an interview conducted in 2005, Wen Jieruo said,

Only if you understand Joyce’s patriotism can you understand Ulysses. Joyce’s

knowledge is so extensive and profound that you can research him from any

angle. I researched it from this angle because it is related to our nationality; like

the Irish we too have been bullied and oppressed by foreign nationals, and

reading Ulysses will produce this resonance.

130

She refers here to previous critical analysis she had done of Ulysses. This statement is

interesting on three levels. Firstly, rather than identifying Joyce’s a-political tendencies, she

categorizes and gives significance to “Joyce’s patriotism” as one of the key factors in

unlocking Ulysses. While I agree with this angle of interpretation, it goes against a lot of

traditional considerations of the text because of Joyce’s pacifism, which inherently rejects

nationalism as a violent force. Secondly, unlike Jin Ti, Wen Jieruo is giving us explicit insight

into her agenda, one which she presumably shared with her husband and co-translator, Xiao

Qian. The fact that she has an agenda when she says that Ulysses might be studied from any

angle but that she has selected this one proves it is reasonable to conclude that not only is this

how she presents the text to be read, but also how she understands the text. At the very least, it

is insight into the fact that she considers nationalism to be Joyce’s main concern in Ulysses.

Thirdly and most importantly, she wants the novel to resonate with the Chinese reader—the

intended audience—on an anti-imperialist or anti-colonialist note. It is “because” China, like

Ireland, has suffered at the hands of foreigners, which in itself becomes an interesting project

because this shared sentiment establishes the exact kind of ‘us’ and ‘them’ dichotomy that

Joyce was trying to abolish with his own interpretation of nationalism, founded on

internationalism. She is not incorrect in emphasizing the dichotomy, since Joyce himself

perverted the English characters and language as viciously and as often as he possibly could in

Ulysses. However, as discussed in the previous chapter, there is a gradient between other

ethnically ‘Irish’ and ‘English’ characters, and the most important fact that emerges from an

analysis of their voices is that not a single one among them—“pure” Irish included—is entirely

without blame or fault.

Whether or not this is a “valid” position for a translator of Ulysses to take is irrelevant: as

Wen says, Joyce’s work is so profound and so well-informed on a diverse range of subjects that

the work can be approached from any direction with equal success. What this chapter will

examine is how the translations’ audience perceives the text of Ulysses in relation to the

concepts of nationalism and patriotism.

In the Chinese articles, interviews, and theses read in preparation to write this chapter, I

notice five focal points of nationalism shared by Chinese critics with regard to Ulysses. They

are the malleability of history in all characters’ hands, the Martello tower as a microcosm of

Ireland, the relationships in the house on Eccles Street as analogous to the creation of

relationships in colonized Ireland, Joyce’s use of ethnicity in the two main characters, and

Stephen’s pre-Ulysses statement that, “…I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of

experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”

131

I am

going to focus on the works of Shen Fuying, Lü Liying, Wen Jieruo, Yu Hongying, He

Zhongsheng, and Li Huaiyu as they represent the Chinese views of nationalism in Ulysses.

Ireland, the Martello Tower

In terms of political allegiance and behavior towards Mother Ireland, life in the Martello

Tower as portrayed in the first episode of Ulysses is a microcosm of the book as a whole: the

plot, cast and setting of the first episode mirrors the greater journey of the rest of the novel.

Stephen is easily read as Bloom, Haines as Deasy, and Buck Mulligan as the Citizen.

According to Shen Fuying, these same characters are geographically allegorical on a

macrocosmic level.

One of the earliest mentions of Haines is Buck Mulligan saying to Stephen that he’s going

to tell the Englishman about something clever Stephen has said. This is in reference to Haines’

desire to collect and document the sayings of the Irish. In her doctoral thesis, Shen argues that

the motivation behind this collection is to gather solid proof of the Irishman’s buffoonery to

present to his compatriots.

132

Or, as Shen says, “but the main real purpose of his [Haines’s]

trip to Ireland is to…fix Irish culture into the framework of his imagined stereotype.”

133

What is that stereotype? She cites the work of Raymond F. Betts when she says that “Some

Englishmen refer to members of the resident populations as ‘niggers’.”

134

So while there is

little to no supporting evidence in Ulysses for the fact that Haines has ungenerous intentions in

collecting these phrases, his other behaviors and his identity as an English imperialist do lend

Shen’s theory credulity. During Joyce’s lifetime and even a century before, English depictions

of the Irish were unkind: in political cartoons, the Irish were often drawn with ape-like features;

in conversation and political commentary, the Irish were often referred to as ‘white negroes’

and ‘apes’; and in all genres of literature the Irish were represented by the stage Irishman,

which is a common enough archetype today.

As Yu Hongying points out, the first episode also sees Haines pulling from his sidepocket a

silver cigarette case adorned with an emerald-green cabochon glittering on top. Yu compares

this to “Henry VIII incorporating the Irish harp pattern into the British royal family coat of

arms to show the rule of Ireland.”

135

Haines is an imperialist, and Ireland is completely in his

hands. He offers Stephen a cigarette from this case, a reflection of his testimonial that they feel

“…in England that we have treated you rather unfairly.”

136

They colonized the land, kept it

neatly stowed in their sidepocket, and for consolation offered negligible compensation.

And according to Lü Liying, just as the English—colonizers of Ireland—established

themselves as lord and master and forced obedience upon the local population, so Haines

administers to Mulligan and Stephen in the tower, commanding them to cook eggs and to pay

for the milk. One example of what Lü identifies as “Haines forc[ing] Mulligan and Stephen to

do everything”

137

is when, with a smile on his face, he tells Buck Mulligan to “Pay up and

look pleasant.”

138

But if Haines is an imperialist, then Buck Mulligan is a betrayer, Irish though he may be.

Lü Liying and Shen Fuying both draw on the moment when Stephen refers to Haines as the

milk woman’s “conqueror” and to Mulligan as her “gay betrayer.”

139

Because of Mulligan’s

friendly relationship with Haines and his tendency towards mockery it is unclear whether or

not this is the case. What Stephen means is that Mulligan is a follower of the Empire, not

necessarily in that he supports it, but in that he does not offer any resistance to it: like the

Citizen, he’d rather sit in the pub and rag about the English, serving them when he sees them,

than actually stand up and rebel.

140

According to Lü, this category of Ireland’s “gay betrayers” is subdivided into two groups,

the “jackals of British colonialists” and the “pleasure seeking Irish people.”

141

The specificity

of this model separates Mulligan from the Citizen, because whereas the Citizen is merely keen

on the next pint, Mulligan scrambles to please Haines, ordering Stephen about without a

second thought. Beyond that, Mulligan is happy enough to himself misuse Stephen (i.e.

Ireland).

Shen, after recognizing this model, turns to another: Buck Mulligan as the Italian Master

that Stephen serves. She argues that, “Joyce’s…equal hatred of the Catholic Church and

repulsion of the ‘gay-betrayers’ often escape contemporary critics’ notice,”

142

even though the

novel opens with Mulligan pretending to be a clergyman and performing a mock mass, a theme

which is continued throughout the rest of the novel. The idea of Mulligan as the Italian Master

does not contradict the image of him as the “gay betrayer” of Ireland: the Church is also

gutting Ireland from the inside out, holding them in submission to a higher force that is equally

as invasive as the English political and military presence.

For the Chinese readers, yet another indicator of Mulligan’s betrayal of Ireland comes from

the moment when Stephen is leaving for work and Mulligan asks for the key. Mulligan and

Haines are well-off characters, but they make Stephen pay rent for the tower. With no option

but to oblige, Stephen hands over the key and even as he leaves knows that he will not be able

to return to “Ireland” that night. Yu draws a connection between the key and the final word of

the first episode of Ulysses, “usurper,” which she says “…points out that Stephen’s home has

been usurped.”

143

Ireland’s “gay betrayers” and England have conspired to lock the Irish

citizen out of Ireland. Wen Jieruo likewise understands Mulligan’s asking for the key as proof

that these “gay betrayers” are just as guilty of “plundering” Ireland as the imperialists

themselves.

144

Identifying Stephen as an allegory for Ireland, Yu draws on the fact that Stephen’s very first

words in the novel are to tell Mulligan that if Haines is staying, he is going. Yu, who authored a

paper on the theme of national liberation in Ulysses, makes the argument that this ultimatum is

evidence of Stephen’s affiliation with Ireland.

145

Later, Lü also engages this idea. Even though

the English and their jackals—Haines and Mulligan—are living in the tower, it is the

perpetually impoverished Ireland that pays taxes for the land, as Stephen must pay rent for the

tower. Yet Haines and Mulligan insist on keeping the key, of having the power.

146

As explored in the previous two chapters, such an interpretation of life in the Martello

Tower is to be expected. Both the Jin and Xiao-Wen translations display tendencies towards

accentuating the dispute between the imperialists and the colonized country, most likely due to

the translators’ own experiences under foreign rule, especially during the first half of the

twentieth century. As mentioned earlier, Wen Jieruo approached the translation of the novel

from a patriotic perspective, because she knew it would resonate with the audience it was

being translated for.

Yu Hongying’s model of the relationships in the Martello tower emphasizes the evil of the

British Empire and the “gay betrayers” of Ireland, as well as the feelings of hatred they give

rise to in Stephen. She analogizes Haines’s cigarette case as captive Ireland and definitively

identifies Haines, i.e. the British, as the reason Stephen leaves home, i.e. Ireland. Like Wen’s

use of the word “plunder,” Yu also employs accusatory words like the original text’s ‘usurper’

to foreground her argument about the abhorrence of traitors to the nation, in this case Mulligan.

While the interpretations offered by Shen and Lü are not too far removed from that of Yu,

they are noticeably less fierce. One clear example of this is in the fact that, rather than

highlighting the activeness of Mulligan’s being a “gay betrayer” through use of words like

‘plunder’ or ‘usurper’, they frame Mulligan as an individual who finds it easier to obey

demands of the oppressor than to rebel. Another, perhaps better, example is that while Haines

and Mulligan come across to these Chinese scholars just as unappealingly as later the English,

“Irish” sympathizers to the English cause, and the impotent Irish pleasure seekers as they are

expected to as the villains in this model, the hero, Stephen, does not come across as the strong

Irish rebel that the Yu interpretation endorses.

One very probable explanation for this disparity is that both Shen and Lü are of a newer

generation that did not ever experience colonization for themselves, whereas Wen and Yu were

both alive during the Japanese occupation and genocide in China in the first half of the

twentieth century. Where a very strong opposition and even loathing of imperialists would be

instinctive to people who had lived through it, it seems less likely that people who were both

physically and temporally removed from such an experience could begin to understand that,

hence the emotional distance from the text for Shen and Lü.

In twentieth century Chinese anti-imperialist propaganda literature and art, individuals of

the colonized nation (e.g. China) have predominately been depicted as resilient and strong, not

just as victims. Stephen, the man who intends to forge the conscience of his race by leaving the

country, is by no means a great nationalist hero, at least not in the way of Chinese

anti-imperialist propaganda. But nor is he meek: he does stand up to the English, picking a

fight with them over the king. So Lü’s analysis that “Here, Stephen the poor artist stands for

the colonized Ireland people who suffer from the harsh ruling of the British”

147

is out of

keeping with the implied positioning of the novel against imperialism by the translators and

older critics, such as Wen and Yu. It does not change the voice of anti-imperialism, just shifts

the perception of the opposition’s role: instead of actively ridiculing the English, this view

victimizes Ireland and focuses on the powerlessness and inaction of the Irish people.

History in the Hands of Imperialists, History in the Hands of Nationalists

As discussed in the introduction, during the time that Joyce was writing Ulysses and before,

both British imperialists and Irish nationalists were fabricating histories that favored their

agendas. Most famously, the Irish Literary Renaissance used as a frame of reference a

‘traditional’ Celtic culture, which was predominately the invention of William Butler Yeats and

Lady Augusta Gregory. The combined efforts of their respective works Fairy and Folk Tales of

the Irish Peasantry and Cuchulain of Muirthemne established the foundation and setting for the

movement to come. It was precisely because of this distortion that Joyce chose to dissociate

himself from those writers: even if he was aligned with their cause, he did not condone their

methods.

Chinese critics and scholars assign history’s mutability the very same task: under their

analysis it becomes a tool for both English and Irish nationalists to express and justify their

reasons for particular behaviors and beliefs that might otherwise be construed as self-serving

and inhumane. Shen Fuying interprets Joyce’s perception of the movement as ‘bi zhou zi zhen’,

a phrase meaning ‘to cherish something of little value simply because it is one’s own’.

148

Interestingly, it is Shen and Lü who most engage with and actively oppose the manipulation of

history, which might be due in large part to the generation gap between them and the rest of the

critics.

Lü foregrounds his argument with the fact that since Joyce was a follower of Vico, he

believed that history as in institution is utterly human. It is therefore impossible for history to

be built on solid fact; instead it is subject to the fluidity of time and memory. That Yeats and his

Revival should misremember a couple of these ever-changing facts was not the issue: it was

the use of wholesale distortion to alter reality, which created ““Xenophobic Cycloptic prejudice

against ‘the other’.”

149

As Yu writes, “Under the cruel control and uncivilized plunder of the English…[Irish]

culture was dead.

150

Shen calls the process of imperialism a complete process of dispossession,

drawing on the post-colonial theory of Seamus Deane. Haines, as the representative of the

English, strips the Irish people of what it means to be Irish. When the old milk maid comes in

the first episode, Haines speaks to her in Irish, and after she initially takes him for French, she

assumes him to be from the west, the very heart of ‘traditional’ Irish values and culture. Thus

the English became more Irish than the Irish.

As Deane and other postcolonial theorists have noted, history has always been the arena in

which dominant groups firmly establish the boundaries of “the other” and “the self,” by

discrediting and perverting the actions of “the other” while simultaneously legitimizing and

absolving any sins or atrocities committed by “the self.” Haines’ most famous line of dialogue

is evidence of this; as Shen points out, “Of course the Englishman Haines does not apologize

for the tragedy brought on in Ireland by imperialization, instead finding an extremely

fabricated excuse for the crimes of the colonizer,” or blaming history.

151

And Haines’ shirking

of responsibility on behalf of the English is not limited to this moment of blaming history for

the heinous actions of the empire-building process.

According to Shen, Stephen’s claim that all history moves towards one thing, “a shout in

the street,”

152

is meant to say that history—represented by the sporting boys outside—is

always a culture war. It is always the stronger culture that claims its victory as a manifestation

of God, and in the second episode Garrett Deasy does just that. Shen writes of the moment,

“Mr. Deasy draws the conclusion that history moves towards one goal, the manifestation of

God.”

153

Like Haines, he shifts the burden of imperialism off his shoulders while

simultaneously reaping the benefits of it.

Lü very neatly sums up the issue at stake in the explanation he and Shen use when he

writes, “Although Mr. Deasy aims to protect the interests of the British colonizers, he takes a

disguise of justice.”

154

Thus by remembering anti-Union Blackwood as pro-Unionist and by

making the Catholic Church condemn the savior of Ireland as a criminal, history teacher Deasy

is appropriating and rewriting Irish history, and it is a history that reflects negatively on the

Irish and positively on his own ancestry—after all, Sir John Blackwood, his relative, was a

Scotsman and Deasy has already told us that he is an Ulsterite, making him a of planter

descent.

On the other side of the coin, and this is something that Yu, Lü, and Shen all discuss, the

characters identified as nationalists in Ulysses are also guilty of distorting history as a means to

an end, most notably the Citizen, who invariably moves history in a direction the exact

opposite of what the imperialist characters were trying to do: whereas Deasy is trying to extol

the virtues of the British Empire by disguising its failings, the Citizen is trying to glorify

Ireland by embellishing past greatness. For example, Yu writes, “The Citizen inexplicably

takes all the society’s problems and pushes them off on ‘sassenachs’, using coarse language to

curse them,” which he follows by quoting the Citizen as he maintains that the little bit of

culture the English have was stolen from the Irish.

155

So in the very way that Deasy was

rewriting Irish history, the Citizen rewrites English history.

Neither process of beautification escapes the attention of the Chinese critics. Yu, Lü, and

Shen, also all identify the over-glorification. For these readers, the circumstances surrounding

the act of fabricating history actually both perpetuate the cycle of oppression by the English:

Lü claims that “Joyce…elevated the importance of the banning of alcohol to something related

to national independence by citing the Irish journalist Robert A. Willson’s slogan ‘Ireland sober

is Ireland free.’”

156

In this way, the Citizen and his equally one-eyed companions sitting in

Barney Kiernan’s pub and drinking the days away, trying to comfort themselves with memories

of glory is surrender; they are only doing the work of the English for them.

To Shen, the manipulation of history is indicative of the pervasiveness of a “Xenophobic

Cycloptic prejudice of ‘the other’” in both nationalist and imperialist sensibilities. Her analysis

explores the examples provided above, but goes even deeper into the manipulations, a task

which culminates with the statement that “The Citizen’s propaganda for the glory and purity of

Ireland…[is] extremely similar to British colonialists’ practice, mak[ing] the Jews and women

as the scapegoats to shoulder the blame…,” which is evidence of the fact that Haines, Mr.

Deasy, and even the Citizen use not just the same tactics but also identical arguments to defend

their positions as, respectively, British imperialists and Irish nationalists.

157

Lü’s earlier assertion that Deasy’s fabrication of history is used as “a disguise of justice” is

later followed by the qualification that, “from his distortion of history and putting all blames on

the other, we can know that the justice is only the justice of pirates.”

158

As evidence of

Deasy’s blaming, Lü quotes a section of dialogue between Stephen and Deasy. Immediately

after Stephen refutes Deasy’s argument that “All human history moves towards… the

manifestation of God,”

159

Deasy repositions his argument, blaming the women who “brought

the strangers” to Ireland,

160

and the “jews”

161

in Britain who “…are the signs of a nation's

decay.”

162

The women he blames are the women that famously “destroyed” MacMurrough,

O’Rourke, and Parnell, and he blames the Jewish race for ruining the British Empire, hence

Ireland’s only moment of greatness in “never let[ting] them in.”

163

The Citizen blames these same women for bringing “the Saxon robbers here,”

164

a fact

which does not escape Shen. She says, “His logic in blaming a woman for misfortune in

history is the same as that of Mr. Deasy when Mr. Deasy blames Helen..., Mrs. O’Shea…,

Eve…”

165

She goes on to say that this is following the tradition of shifting the blame that

should be on the shoulders of the oppressors/men onto the shoulders of the oppressed/women,

since she draws a link between post-colonial literature and gender. Lü agrees with Shen on this,

but adds that the Citizen’s violent attack on Bloom at the end of the episode for saying that

Jesus was a Jew is proof of his strong anti-Semitism. Besides these two tendencies, Lü points

out, the Citizen also disparages other nationalities in an attempt to boost morale: the British

Empire becomes a “syphilisation,”

166

and the French are a “Set of dancing masters…never

worth a roasted fart to Ireland.”

167

Lü, unlike Shen, sees this fabrication as supporting

evidence for the fact that Joyce believes “Different versions may come out of a single

event.”

168

Although Yu has some insight into the issue of fabrication, the works of Shen and Lü

concern themselves primarily with the fabrication of history in Ulysses. Shen, whose stance is

much stronger than either of the others, does not dwell very long on the imperialist side of

matters, but she returns again and again to the reasons why Irish nationalists should involve

themselves in it. Justification via deprecation from the imperialists is expected, but the fact that

the colonized people reciprocate just as readily with contempt for minority civilian groups

presents a problem. In order to alleviate the negativity of the Citizen’s behavior, Shen allows

him the benefit of the doubt. She writes,

Partly due to their purity of Irish culture, partly due to their repulsion for the

assistance from the marginalized Irish people, the nationalists’ goal of

reviving Irish culture is doomed to failure. The inevitable feeling of failure

and disillusionment drives many of those nationalist Cyclops into the pub…

169

She is suggesting that rather than actual malice towards women and other minority groups,

the Citizen is merely disappointed by his own impotence and, as a result, is making drunken

accusations to make himself feel better. The importance placed on the idea of national and

racial unity in China may be the reason Shen is so intent on preserving the Citizen’s status as a

national “hero.”

The critics wanted to emphasize the binary of imperialism versus nationalism. They allow

the heinousness of the British Empire and its followers to speak for itself, often accentuating

their crimes, such as when Shen claims that Haines’s little book of phrases is intended to mock

the quaint Irish mind. And although they express the negativity and futility of the nationalists’

manipulations, they still do as much as possible to bury it, as in the example above.

There are two main methods of doing this, and Lü does them both. Firstly, by making

excuses for the behavior of the Citizen and his followers by claiming that it as an effort to

comfort and strengthen themselves. Secondly, after laying out the comparison between the

Citizen and Deasy, he draws attention to the fact that Stephen rejects any such criticisms,

correcting Deasy’s crass remarks about Jews as they are voiced. Lü points out that when Mr.

Deasy says that “the Jew merchants are already at their work of destruction,” Stephen defends

them by pointing out that every merchant “buys cheap and sells dear, Jew or genitile,” and

when Mr. Deasy condemns the Jews as “sinned against the light,” Stephen opposes him by

asking “Who has not?...”

170

Lü furthers his audience’s rapture with Stephen, including his

reflections that behind the Protestants’ glorious, pious and immortal memory lie the “corpses of

papishes” and “the black north” and the deep-rooted hatred to make “croppies lie down.”

171

Because they are wittingly or unwittingly adopting—like the translators—an anti-imperialist

tone in their analysis, it is in the best interest of the critics to protect the image of the hero, in

this instance the nationalist.

Shen engages this idea, as does Lü, by framing over-glorified Ireland as Gerty MacDowell,

the girl on Sandymount Strand in the thirteenth episode. Gerty thinks of herself as “the most

idealistic, most romantic, most sentimental, most attractive beautiful heroine.”

172

Here she is

just like the Citizen, sitting at Barney Kiernan’s and praising the four beautiful green fields, the

Irish economy and culture. Yet in the end, Bloom still realizes that it is a lame beauty, which

led Lü to write that it “indicates Joyce’s awareness of the impotence of Irish culture under the

British colonization, in spite of nationalists’ great effort to glorify their own history and

culture.”

173

Anthropologically, it is not at all surprising that the critics assume nationalists accept and

use the same explanations as the imperialists have been forcing on them. As Deane notes,

“External domination has been introjected to the point that a nation, so construed, may be said

to have learned nothing from oppression but oppression itself.”

174

But in the end, the question

becomes why? Why do they tease out this issue of falsified history? If it was only in order to

vilify the British for their empire building, then why do they also announce this significant

degree of uniformity between the two versions of history?

Perhaps it is in an effort to dispel the habit of ‘bi zhou zi zhen’, ‘to cherish something of

little value simply because it is one’s own’, idealizing and idolizing the motherland because it

is the motherland and in spite of any flaws. This would certainly be a valid and interesting

approach, because there is a tendency in China—as in most countries—to not approach issues

of the nation just because it is easier to live with the failings, however invasive, than institute

change and reform.

Strangers in the House on Eccles Street

Gerty is not the only character to be read allegorically by the Chinese critics. Rather than

the traditional use of virtues or the first episode’s use of political allegiance, each of three

characters involved in the Bloom household at 11 Eccles Street on the day of June 16

, 1904 is

read by the Chinese critics as an allegory for a specific culture, as with Gerty as the fabricated

culture over-glorified by the Revivalists. The basic premise of this model is that Bloom’s

household has, like Ireland, been betrayed. The betrayal as written is the sexual affair between

Bloom’s wife Molly and her tour manager, Blazes Boylan. As parsed out by He Zhongsheng,

the identities of each character are Boylan for British culture, Bloom for the impotent Irish

culture of the present, and Molly for the future of Irish culture, although it is Shen Fuying that

really delves into the character of Molly.

Between being persecuted as a Jew, being cuckolded, and being subservient to his wife,

Bloom is a clear analogy of Ireland being in servitude to the British Empire, cuckolded by its

own people—jackals like Deasy and Mulligan, and the powerless pleasure-seekers like the

Citizen. Bloom suffers from these blows, but as He Zhongsheng would have it, Bloom made

his own bed by being too unfeeling towards Molly. He writes, “…Bloom clearly knows that his

wife and her theater manager Boylan are having intercourse at his home, but does not dare

interfere. Instead he holes himself up in a pub and painfully imagines his wife having an

affair.”

175

But his inaction does not just cause Bloom to suffer; according to He Zhongsheng,

“This conclusion is of Bloom’s own making…because of his coldness to Molly, his sexual

impotence, and his unwillingness to act.”

176

And as He Zhongsheng elaborates, every time

Bloom sees Blazes on the street that day, he makes himself think about something else, trying

to forget what is going to happen that afternoon. Unsurprisingly, He interprets Bloom’s

unwillingness to interfere with the affair that is making a fool of him as the Irish not being

infuriated enough in their opposition to imperialism.

177

By chance, because Boylan is the instigator of the “plundering” of the future of Irish

culture from Ireland in the model He Zhongsheng established, he becomes an allegory for

Britain. More importantly, what goes on between Molly and Boylan is not love in the remotest

sense. Never does He Zhongsheng or Shen use the word. Instead, He uses the words ‘commit

adultery’ or ‘affair’ to discuss it, such as when he writes that “the affair between Molly and

Boylan is the destruction of the Bloom family,” and therefore Ireland.

178

According to Shen,

Boylan, with his strong sexual drive, lascivious flirtation with any female, and pleasure at

commandeering that which is not his, is a strong analogy for the “aggressiveness and vitality”

of British culture.

179

Molly, as the future of Irish culture, is forced to sleep around because Bloom has avoided

full intercourse with her for the past eleven years, which is evidenced by He’s statement from

above that Bloom’s coldness towards Molly forces her to seek other outlets for sexual

gratification. Beyond that, He draws very strong bonds between Molly and Ireland when he

writes, “…She [Molly] was betrayed by external and internal forces. Ireland was betrayed, and

so was Bloom’s home…”

180

But Shen takes this argument one step further. According to Shen,

Molly and her countless illicit lovers—of which many Bloom is aware—“analogize the future

cultural hybridity of Irish culture with other cultures.”

181

Although it will be a hybrid culture,

it will still have Irish roots; she is not averse to reviving her “native culture,” as demonstrated

by her willingness to rekindle the youthful relationship she once shared with Bloom, which

comes across in the final page of the novel, because Blazes is a mere “sexual toy” and not at all

a “lover.”

182

Wen Jieruo points out that even Molly, the future, remembers a

lover—Gardner—killed while away fighting for the English in South Africa and is infuriated

over it.

183

The most weighted parts of this argument are that the situation is of Bloom’s making, that

Molly is more than willing to restore her relations with Bloom, and that Blazes means nothing

to Molly. The effect is such that British culture becomes a kind of disposable tool that Irish

culture (Bloom) might learn from, and “traditional” Irish culture takes partial fall for their

continued oppression, perpetuating the overarching theme of opposition to imperialism. The

outsiders are satisfactorily impugned and the actions of the home population corrected: do not

ignore your household duties.

He Zhongsheng’s theory of the text is reaffirmed and carried one step further by Shen when

she writes, “Molly… finally draws the conclusion that it is Bloom she really loves and is

determined to give Bloom a chance to overcome his impotence and be united with her because

she feels attracted again by his broad-visioned love, acceptance and consideration.”

184

Thus

only in doing right by Molly will Bloom be able to overcome his blind devotion to her, and

only then will Molly have reason to expel the strangers from the house. This is essentially the

same as He Zhongsheng’s analysis, except that Shen literally extrapolates the connection out to

extend into the future, beyond what is, to what might be. She begins to formulate her own

solution to issues of imperialism; only if the Irish past can learn to live with and in the Irish

future will there be no need for the presence of the British (i.e. colonizer).

A Jew and an Irishman Walk Into a Bar

Nearly every piece of literature that referenced nationalism at all pointed out that Joyce

once referred to Ulysses as “…an epic of two races (Israelite-Irish)…,”

185

referring to the two

main characters, a statement supportable by a myriad of quotations or possible close readings

the critics might have drawn from the text, either when Deasy or the Citizen was haranguing

Judaism. Yet the Chinese critics only scratch the surface of the issue, even with four of them

separately commenting on it.

Two such supporting details are instances of highlighting Joyce’s diction. One is He, who

zeroes in on the Citizen’s use of the word ‘tribes’ to describe the lost Irish people, referring to

the millions who either died or emigrated during the Great Famine. Critic He explicitly states

the implied comparison to Canaan before going on to give the specifics of eight centuries of

oppression in Ireland, the lost tribes of Israel, and the Irish population problem in order to

underscore the similarities between the two situations. The second is Yu, who picks out use of

the word ‘chief’ in the fifth episode to refer to Charles Stuart Parnell. According to Yu, ‘chief’

is an ancient Celtic form of address, and that this accent that Joyce gives the character is full of

rich historical connotation and overflows with the state of mind specific to the Irish race.

186

The third critic to add anything to Joyce’s remark on the bi-racial nature of the text is Li

Huaiyu, who in the article “Ulysses Readme: A Key to Unlocking the Text” reads Ulysses as a

mounting of the broken pieces of both races’ history onto the every day life of this one day.

187

This analysis is not markedly different from Joyce’s own statement of Ulysses being “an epic

of two races,” with the exception of the word ‘xiangqian’. It is the word used here to mean

‘mount’, although in its original context it is specific to processes of jewelry making—‘mount’,

‘set’, ‘decorate’, jewel(v), or do niello work. There are several other words he might have used

instead. In Chinese, you only ‘xiangqian’ a precious gemstone, and thus rather than the

objective statement that it is “an epic of two races,” Li assigns a value to the two races in

question: they are precious, and they are broken pieces that need to be put together, mounted

around something whole.

The expression of Joyce’s own view not withstanding, the issue of the “Israelite-Irish”

duality seems to have had little bearing on the critics’ reading of Ulysses. One of the more

plausible explanations for this is the predominance of the idea of oneness in the Chinese

concept of nationalism which would make an importance placed upon duplicate nationalities

be politically problematic.

As Seamus Deane says in an essay on post-colonialism,

Culture, when it is propagated as a canonical system, always asserts its

“monogenealogy,” repressing its internal differences and hybrid origins,

proclaiming itself xenophobically, ethnocentrically, in clamant and

mystificatory ways as unitary.

188

This kind of post-imperialist nationalism is the key pitfall of the patriotic characters on both

sides of the divide. Deasy claims that “We are all Irish, all kings’ sons.”

189

However, this “we”

includes only Scottish planters and the “fenians,” and does not stretch beyond to include

anything that Deasy himself does not respect, like Jewish people—Irish by birth though some

of them might be. The Citizen is the same, abusing Bloom because he is by heritage Jewish in

spite of the fact that he identifies more with being Irish. Deasy assumes that Ireland is

untainted by a “polygenealogy,” while the Citizen attempts to filter out the polluting bubbles of

genetic diversity. They can accept the Scottish and even the English, because they share

common origins—but the Jews are another matter all together.

Shen, who also quotes Joyce on the topic of the nationality dualism in Ulysses, chooses to

weave the two nationalities together as Joyce did, “Israelite-Irish.” As in many traditional

readings of the text, Shen interprets Stephen’s mother as a symbol of Ireland. She discusses the

exchange in terms of Stephen’s “quest” for a mother’s love, which is a direct correlation to his

search for a motherland. She says that, according to the second episode of Ulysses, an

individual lacking both the persona and the relationship with mother/motherland is nothing but

“a squashed, boneless snail.”

190

Therefore, Shen concludes, the act of giving up mother and

motherland is inherently a betrayal, and Stephen and Bloom in doing so must “leave” the

country to become wanderers.

191

With this final statement Shen winds the two nationalities together: the fact that Stephen

and Bloom have two different motherlands is inconsequential. In a way, Shen is subjugating

the need for specific ethnic identity to the importance of acknowledging the broader allegiance

to a nation. Thus the fact of “two races,” is less important than the similarity between the two:

the Jew and the Irishman, having both forsaken motherland, are forced to become wanderers

through Dublin, and since wandering is often associated with exile, it is one of the harshest

punishments for one of the worst crimes. This again hales back to the importance of a unified

genealogy to colonized and post-colonial nations.

This pattern of forced “monogenealogy” even in the face of truth was and still is as true in

China as it was and still is in Ireland. Post-colonial nations, having framed their unified

national identities in reaction to imperialization, continue to think of themselves in those terms

even after the invading power has departed. This sense of nationalism remains built on the idea

of oneness. Anything different, as was demonstrated in the section on the fabrication of history,

is either ignored or stigmatized. But as Shen Fuying argues and as I myself would argue,

Ulysses is a drawing board for a new kind of nationalism. It is one that ignores the physical and

historical “truths” for a more cerebral approach.

Forging the Conscience and a New Nationalism

At the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen says, “I go to encounter for

the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated

conscience of my race.” Shen Fuying and Wen Jieruo understand Ulysses to be the result of

that forging, especially since it was written after Joyce exiled himself from Ireland, as Stephen

had done in order go forward with his plan.

Wen gets caught up in Joyce’s idea that only by writing what is in your blood (e.g. national

identity) do you arrive at internationalism, and that only out of a passionate sense of

nationalism. She quotes him on the subject, and how he remarked that if he could get at the

heart of Dublin then he could get at the heart of any great metropolis, which returns to Patrick

Kavanagh’s idea that the parochial is the universal and is in keeping with the Joycean

definition of ‘nationalism’ as delineated in the introduction of this work, in itself a new

nationalism.

192

In the abstract to her doctoral thesis, Shen offers constructing a new patriotism as the

solution to Stephen’s quandary of history being “a nightmare from which I am trying to

awake.”

193

She draws the connection between forging the conscience and this new patriotism

by focusing on the fact that in both instances nothing new is actually being created, just

recombined. Incidentally, or perhaps not, that is precisely what the language of the text

does—creates a new language out of components that are not only not new, but are in fact

predominately antique. However, Shen does not bring this up, although it would have been

beneficial to her argument of hybridity. She defines the new nationalism when she writes, “It is

extremely urgent to put emphasis on keeping to native culture and extracting the beneficial

elements from foreign cultures to supplement native culture while repelling what is harmful in

it.”

194

What is “harmful,” as she writes later, is the indiscriminate imposition of foreign

cultures, such as British culture, onto the native one.

Shen’s interpretation of Ulysses is, if anything, a more modern approach to the issue of

imperialism. Like the others, it rejects the violent and physical subjugation of the people and

culture of one nation by the people and culture of another. The difference is that in this instance

Shen does not react to that violence of people and culture by discrediting or defaming the

British. Quite the opposite, she suggests there are things that the Irish stand to learn from the

British when she talks about “the beneficial elements from foreign cultures.”

195

The critics are in, and by and large the few that involve themselves with the topic of

nationalism in Ulysses understand that aspect of it exactly as it is presented to them by the two

1994 translations. Probably due to the “united” mindset of the general Chinese populace, the

predominant understanding of the nationalist sentiment is involved in debunking the authority

of the imperial power while simultaneously trying to enhance the standing of the opposing

nationalist forces.

Among the critics, Shen stands head and shoulders above the others, just in sheer volume

and breadth of work on the topic of nationalism. Between the two separate works of her

analysis addressed here, she covers the entire spectrum of topics as addressed by the other

critics, the key difference being that Shen seems to always push her analysis beyond a mere

surface examination, which to some extent Lü does as well.

The one likely explanation, which was mentioned in passing earlier, is the age gap between

Shen, Lü and the others: unlike the others, they were not alive during the periods in which

parts of China were under imperialism, namely from the late 1920s until after World War II. It

is not only a matter of personal experience, either; being born after this era, neither Shen nor

Lü finished their higher education until the late 2000s. This means that their education was

already radically different from that of the others, many of whom were indoctrinated into

literature under the influence of the Maoist Regime, which of course was an insular structure.

Shen and Lü, on the other hand, were educated in a time when western thoughts and theories

were embraced in China, rather than reviled. Also, because Shen and Lü have the advantage of

coming after the others, the burden of surface level analysis does not fall to them and they are

able to build off the understanding pre-established in the Chinese academic sphere by the

critics preceding them.

Perhaps the most important point of all is Wen’s statement that, to her, nationalism is the

key to unlocking Ulysses. According to Frederic Jameson, “the story of the private individual

destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and

society.”

196

Even though Ireland is not a third-world country and would not have been

considered as such even when Ulysses was written, yet its long-term oppression by outside

forces instilled Irish culture and the mindset with third-world ways of thinking. And Ulysses is

a story of the “private individual destiny,” which for Stephen is to forge the conscience.

Coming from a third-world country herself, Wen was probably heavily influenced by her own

experience of subjugation, which led her to understand the novel in the way that she explicitly

says she does. It also seems likely that Wen’s voice here speaks for the rest of her peers, who

indeed also read the novel as an allegory for, as Jameson says, “the embattled situation” of the

nation.

100

CONCLUSION

Bloom in Beijing or Stephen in Shanghai:

Monogenealogical Brotherhood and Hybrid Nationalism

“The most important thing, therefore, was to change their spirit, and since at that time I

felt that literature was the best means to this end, I determined to promote a literary

movement.”

197

According to postcolonial cultural theorists, the hybridity inherent in the cultures of both

the oppressor and the oppressed in the post-colonial period (i.e. once the foreign forces have

completely withdrawn) is the result of the native population being forced to mimic the

“civilized” behavior of the controlling population. Generally speaking, the typical outcome of

the hybridity is a people who resemble the oppressor in mannerism, but who are native by birth,

which is one possible explanation as to why the nationalist and imperialist forces as

represented in James Joyce’s Ulysses share very similar characteristics and attitudes.

Yet despite the likeness between the nationalists and the imperialists, the groups are still

repulsed by one another: the soldiers would not recognize the Citizen as being a subject of the

English crown just as he would not identify himself as one, even though the entire time the

novel was being written Ireland was part of the United Kingdom.

The first two Chinese translations of Ulysses, by Jin Ti and by Xiao Qian with Wen Jieruo,

take this as their understanding of nationalist conflict in the text. The voices and words of the

characters are divided neatly into the two groups with little to no grey area between the two.

Given that in 1994 all three of the translators were well up in age, it is safe to say that they

had each experienced the brutality of imperialism for themselves. The cultural nationalism that

emerged from invasion by first Europe and then Japan must have impressed the critical notion

of unity to the nation onto their minds.

101

In the translations, this mentality is evident. Both the Jin and Xiao-Wen translations

highlight the conflict between the British and the Irish, whereas the conflict between different

“types” of Irish people is overlooked, in both what is being said and how it was said. The first

chapter of this work focused on the attention to nationalism in the footnotes of the initial two

translations. The result is that positive pro-nationalist monogenealogical references are

annotated, thus drawing attention to them, whereas imperialist or separatist references are

either unacknowledged or reflected on negatively. I concluded that the main reason for the

translators’ overall non-differentiation between types of nationalism and focus on

anti-imperialism probably springs from the fact of their own cultural upbringing rather than

any particular agenda.

This statement is also applicable to the conclusion of the second chapter, which laid out the

translators’ approach to differentiating between the voices of different “ethnicities.” In the end,

the voices of the Anglo-Irish and the Northern-Irish all blend into the voice of the “pure” Irish,

which is only contrasted with the voices of English characters, the result being a focus on the

dichotomy of the colonized and the colonizer. Even with the knowledge that at least the

Xiao-Wen translation was partially operating on a stated pro-nationalist (i.e. pro-Republican)

agenda, the conclusion is only fortified. Wen is very explicit in the fact that the reason for

selecting nationalism as a point of entry to Ulysses is because it will create compatriotism with

the Irish and their situation under imperialism.

Those early Chinese critics of Ulysses working from these translations that approach the

text from the topic of nationalism also focus on the absolute refusal of one group to deal with

the other. All of these early critics are also products of the Cultural Revolution. As a result,

102

sometimes the negative actions of the “Irish” characters—especially those of the Citizen—are

partially justified in criticisms, whereas the negative actions of the “British” are consistently

played up and exaggerated. The issue of any gradient between the two is only addressed by

Shen Fuying, as is the issue of cultural hybridity. Ingrained as the idea of a monogenealogy

was in Chinese culture for so long, it is little surprise that both the translators and the critics

were not in tune with the subtleties of race in Ulysses.

But there is a grey middle space, even amongst the characters. These are represented by

Deasy, who claims to be Irish despite his planter descent, but identifies with the English,

separating himself from the nation of Ireland in the condescending way he speaks to Stephen

about Catholics and fenians.

The tension of national identity is present throughout the entire text, up until the end of the

seventeenth episode, when Molly’s voice takes over for Stephen and Bloom, and ethnicity is

not something that concerns her at all—she will couple with anyone who has something to

contribute to her wellbeing. Shen Fuying’s analysis of Molly as an allegory of the future Irish

culture (i.e. post-colonial) is especially appropriate because it pairs well with her construction

of Joyce’s “new nationalism” as one that nurture’s the “native” culture while simultaneously

welcoming adaptations of beneficial aspects of foreign cultures.

Despite the fact that Shen’s idea of Ulysses being a vehicle for Joycean nationalism is the

one divergent voice in the understanding of nationalism in the novel by Chinese critics, in

actuality it might be the most relevant argument for anyone to have made. The new nationalism,

as she defines it, varies only slightly from the cultural structure of post-colonial societies

according to post-colonial scholars. The difference is this: that rather than rejecting the

103

hybridity of both cultures as problematic, Shen embraces it as Joyce’s escape plan to the

nightmare of history.

Shen and her interpretation of Ulysses are a sign of a new generation of scholars in

China—one that has not been subjected to the cruelty of imperialism or colonization. Even

though she was born during the Cultural Revolution, her tertiary education did not come until

after the Revolution had ended and China was re-opened to the outside world. Even just the ten

years between the early criticisms that emerged as soon as the translations hit the market and

Shen writing her doctoral thesis in the late 2000s produced a significant and important

difference in Chinese readings of the theme of nationalism in Ulysses.

Translator Wen Jieruo was perhaps the earliest Chinese scholar to read Joyce’s work as

having, at the heart of it, nationalist sentiment. When she was working on the translation with

her husband Xiao Qian, she wanted the Irish nationalist spirit to resonate with the Chinese

reader. She said that that was why she chose to highlight the nationalists in her own critical

work on the subject. But thirteen years after the Xiao-Wen translation was published, Chinese

scholars are already not even remarking on this resonance. Shen Fuying and her student, Lü

Liying (2010) are both distant from the compatriotism inspired by Ulysses.

The factors that influenced the translators to identify—and want the reader to

identify—with the Irish Diaspora were more than likely feelings of resentment towards the

institution of imperialism for the brutality and hybridity it instituted in China during their

lifetimes. As a result, they picked out Ireland as a “third-world” country, and read Ulysses as a

narrative of the nation.

198

These same feelings also probably helped the critics to connect to

the text in the same narrow-minded way, seeing only the smaller picture of a powerful nation

104

usurping from a powerless nation.

Aloof from this, Shen gently discredits previous notions of the “nationalism” Joyce has on

offer in the novel: no undue resentment, and certainly none of the “Xenophobic cycloptic

prejudice against ‘the other’” that previously prevented or stigmatized learning from the

colonizer, which is to say it destabilizes the power so long credited to the concept of

monogealogy in cultural nationalism.

This proof is important for two reasons. First, the disinclination to associate her own

country’s history

199

from her reading of Ulysses despite the similar grievances of the two

nations is indicative of new levels of objectivity in approaching literary analysis, especially

since previous critics such as Wen showed that they were susceptible to this resonance. The

second is that Shen is also one of the first—if not the first—Chinese scholars of Joyce to define

Joycean nationalism. None of the other Chinese scholars that spent any length of time on the

theme of nationalism even distinguished between types of nationalism, but Shen defined it in

terms not far from the definition of it in the introduction to this project, as a kind of love for

one’s nation without separating it from the collective of all nations, which means that Ulysses

is finally getting the depth of analysis in China appropriate to a novel of its merit.

Literary merit is not the only reason that this depth is important: as demonstrated in the

introduction, Joyce’s post-modern, deconstructionist style especially as represented in Ulysses

had a visible impact on modern Chinese writing, and that was before the Chinese audience

understood much about the work at all. Now, however, with the introduction of Shen’s “new

nationalism” (i.e. Joycean nationalism), comes the idea that something “new” can be

constructed out of “old” components, like the language of Ulysses. Her work on the novel

105

finally highlights the most important and most revolutionary aspect of Joyce: the “message” of

the novel can be extracted from how the novel is constructed rather than what it says.

106

Endnotes

Gabaldon, Diana. Dragonfly in Amber. New York: Bantam Dell, 1992, 907.

Charles Edward Stuart.

In point of fact, Prince Charlie was fighting for the English throne, which at the time ruled

over Scotland, England, Wales and Ireland. (His family was Scottish.) He garnered support

from the Irish because he was Catholic and as monarch would have been more equitable

towards the Irish. There are very few references to the Jacobite insurrections of the eighteenth

century in Ulysses, but it is interesting to consider the most overt of them: at 2.200 Garret

Deasy is described as possessing a Stuart coin collection. He keeps the coins displayed neatly

in a little glass case, ostensibly because they are precious items. In actual fact, Deasy the

Ulsterite is keeping the royal (Catholic) Stuarts boxed up on his mantle piece, quaint and

outdated, exactly where they belong in his esteem: something to marvel at for its quixotic-ness.

It is as if Deasy is saying to the Republic, ‘This is what I think of your king.’

"Nationalism." Def. 1. Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Encyclopedia Britannica. Web. 30 Nov.

2011.

Nolan, Emer. James Joyce and Nationalism. New York: Routledge, 1995, 10.

In his Graveside Panegyric for Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, Pearse said, “Life springs from

death; and from the graves of patriot men and women spring living nations.” (Pearse, Pádraig

H. “Patrick H. Pearse's Oration Over The Grave Of O'Donovan Rossa,” 1 August 1915.

http://www.easter1916.net, 11 April 2012.)

To avoid confusion, the character referred to as ‘the citizen’ in the text of Ulysses will be

addressed as ‘the Citizen’ in this work.

Nolan, 91.

Nolan, 28.

Lloyd, David. Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the

Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987, 168.

Consider the masturbation scene on the beach in the thirteenth episode, the brothel scene of

the fifteenth episode, and the scene in the eighteenth episode leading up to the end where

Molly orgasms.

Germany was the first country to publish a translation of Ulysses, in 1927. This date falls

before its publication in both Britain and the United States. Ulysses wouldn’t win its supreme

court case until 1933- a case raised because of the non-family friendly nature of the text.

Roses and Thorns: The Second Blooming of the Hundred Flowers in Chinese Fiction,

1979-1980. Ed. Perry Link. Berkely: University of California Press, 1984, 7.

The original gives the word ‘prose’ in English.

“这部书恐怕非但是今年，也许是这个时期里的一部独一著作，他书后最后 100 页，那

真是纯料的‘Prose’，像牛酪一样润滑，像教堂里石坛一样光澄，非但大写字母没有，连

可厌的符号一齐灭迹，也不分章句篇节，像一大匹白罗披泻，一大卷瀑布倒挂，丝毫不

露痕迹，真大手笔！” (《康桥西野暮色》, 1922)

Zhou was a leftwing writer.

《英美意识流小说述评》, 1964.

Qian, Zhongshu (钱钟书). Guan Zhui Bian （管锥编）. Beijing: Shulin Press, 1990, 394-5.

《外国现代作品选》1981, # 2

107

“不管你喜欢也罢，不喜欢也罢，它总是本世纪人类在文学创作上的一宗奇迹。” [Joyce,

James. Ulysses（《尤利西斯》）. Trans. Xiao Qian (萧乾) and Wen Jieruo (文洁若). Nanjing:

Yilin Press (译林出版社), 1994, 4.]

“同样值得深思的是，这部如今已确立为二十世纪最重要的英语文学著作的小

说……”[Joyce, James. Ulysses. (《尤利西斯》). Trans. Jin Ti (金隄). Beijing: The People’s

Literature Publishing House (人民文学出版社), 1994 (volume 1)/1996 (volume 2), 1064.]

“God Kinch, if you and I could only work together we might do something for the island.

Hellenise it.” [Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York : Random House, 1986, 1.157-9] From here

on, all quotes from the text of Ulysses will be cited in the above format, giving first the episode

number, followed by the line numbers, as is standard practice.

Interestingly enough, Robert Hand in Exiles is similarly satirized for the opposite idea. He says,

“These cigars Europeanize me. If Ireland is to become a new Ireland she must first become

European. And that is what you are here for, Richard. Some day we shall have to choose

between England and Europe. I am descendant of the dark foreigners: that is why I like to be

here. I may be childish. But where else in Dublin can I get a bandit cigar like this or a cup of

black coffee? The man who drinks black coffee is going to conquer Ireland.” [Joyce, James.

Exiles. London: Penguin Books, 1973, 51.]

Co-translated with Wen Jie Ruo.

林纾.

Feng, Qi (冯奇). A Critical Biography of Lin Shu and His Selected Works (《林纾评传作品

选》). Beijing : Chinese Literature and History Press (中国文史出版社), 1998, 185.

Gao, Wanlong. “Lin Shu’s Choice and Response in Translation from a Cultural

Perspective.” The Journal of Specialised Translation 13, 2010, 34.

Lin, Shu (林纾). “Preface to Oliver Twist.” Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on

Literature, 1893-1945. Ed. Kirk A. Denton. Trans. Yenna Wu. Stanford: Standford University

Press, 1996, 83.

Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: The Viking Press, 1967,

238-253.

Krishnamurti, J. Freedom from the Known. Ed. Mary Lutyens. New York: HarperOne, 1969,

51.

This particular perception of the effects of globalism has roots in Wyndham Lewis’ Time

and Western Man.

Kavanagh, Patrick. “The Parish and the Universe.” Patrick Kavanagh Collected Prose.

London: Gibbon and Kee, 1967, 282.

“Then?

He kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on each plump melonous

hemisphere, in their mellow yellow furrow, with obscure prolonged provocative

melonsmellonous osculation.” (17.2240-3)

“and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to

say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me

so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes

I will Yes.” (18.1605-9)

See Yeats’ work “Cathleen Ní Houlihan” for more on this.

Deane, Seamus. “Imperialism/Nationalism.” Critical Terms for Literary Study. Ed. Frank

Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, 366.

However, it would be a mistake to assume that nationalism is traditionalism, even though

108

the convention is to equate anti-nationalism with modernity.

The fact that Joyce chose to build the novel on The Odyssey presents another facet of his

novel’s anti-nationalist surface. If he needed a known myth to build up from, why not use the

Irish epic, Táin Bó Cúailnge?

For example, Ulysses in Taipei by Ye Weilian (《尤利西斯在台北》叶维廉) in 1960, Armed

Christ by Lu Yin (《配枪的基督》Lu Yin) in 1960, Ulysses in the New World by Cong Su（《尤

利西斯在新大陆》丛苏），and The Drunkard by Liu Yichang (《酒徒》刘以昌) in 1963.

Lázaro, Alberto. “The History of the First Catalan Ulysses by J. F. Vidal Jové.” Papers on

Joyce 14, 2008, 51.

"prestigiar el indiscutible valor cultural de la lengua catalana" [Saladrigas, Robert. “La

llegada de Ulysses a Catalunya.” La Vanguardia 4.16.1981, 3.]

Iribarren, Teresa. “The Reception of James Joyce in Catalonia.” The Reception of James

Joyce in Europe vol. 2. Ed. Geert Lemout and Wim Van Miedo. London: Thoernmes

Continuum, 2004, 453.

The word ‘tragicomic’ has roots in the Latin ‘tragicocomoedia’, which became

‘tragicommedia’ in Middle French, but it was Joyce who is credited with introducing it into

English.

Xiao, Bing Tang. “The Mirror of History and History as Spectacle: Reflections on Xiao Ye

and Su Tong.” Chinese Mordern: The Heroic and the Quotidian. Durham: Duke University

Press, 2000, 243.

McCann, Colum. Let the Great World Spin. New York: Random House, 2009, 32.

1.400-6

Sean-Bhean bhocht

The four green fields refer to the four early provinces of Ireland: Ulster, Munster, Leinster,

and Connacht.

Jin 1994, 19.

The younger personification of Ireland is often called Róisín Dubh, or Dark Rosaleen. Here

Jin draws from the mythology of Yeats’ play “Cathleen Ní Houlihan,” in which the poor old

woman comes knocking at the door of a family with a young son. As soon as he agrees to go to

war to protect her four green fields and to toss the strangers (the English) from her house, she

becomes in his eyes a beautiful young woman.

Any translations from the Chinese not annotated are my own.

Xiao-Wen, 71.

Around 6000.

12.1240-1

15.1516-8

The cell system of terrorism created paramilitaries, and works like this: each independent

cell has ten or fewer members, tightly knit. They have very little contact with the larger

organization; they have one task or specific role in the greater scheme. This reduces the risk of

being discovered or captured, and if they are captured, then the damage does not infiltrate

further into the system because the cell group knows nothing specific about the activities of

other members of the larger institution. It is at least purported to be a plan of Irish origin,

initially used by a republican group such as the IRA or the IRB.

Xiao-Wen, 1207.

In note number 220 on page 361, it is explained that to his dying day, Moses was unable to

enter the land of Canaan even though God had promised him it would be the land of his people

[the Jews]. Note 370 on page 814 and note 126 on page 1479 both also point out specific

examples of Joyce equating Ireland to Israel.

109

15.4932-3

15.4941-2

For another example of a poem that attempts to ease his feelings of guilt at inaction, see

“Easter 1916.”

Jin 1996, 827.

He “set the poem to music and praised it as the best lyric in the world.” (Ellman, Richard.

James Joyce. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965, 69.)

Xiao-Wen, 1259.

In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in response to a friend saying, “A man’s country

comes first. Ireland first.,” Stephen says, “Do you know what Ireland is?... Ireland is the old

sow that eats her farrow.” (Joyce 1967, 206).

9.36-7

Jin 1994, 276.

Xiao-Wen, 500.

Rather than transliterating the title to imitate the sound of the original title, Xiao and Wen

instead called the play, “Gap-Toothed Cathleen.”

4.73

An Gorta Mór, or the Great Hunger.

Joyce 1967, 206.

Xiao-Wen, 175.

2.268-272

Joyce, James. Stephen Hero. Binghamton: New directions, 1944, 59.

Jin 1994, 50.

Jin 1994, 94.

Xiao-Wen, 105.

11.1284-94

12.1211-14

Jin 1994, 494.

Xiao-Wen, 814.

The O’Neill family, a Northern family, were kings of Ulster and high kings of Ireland

between the 5

and 17

centuries of Ireland. It was an O’Neill (Hugh) that was defeated by the

English in the Siege of Kinsale in 1601, which was the deciding battle in the English conquest

of the island.

12.1280-5

The other being Stephen’s Green.

Jin 1994, 520.

Xiao-Wen, 840.

Tacitus, quoted in “Irish Language Notes,” United Irishman (1896). [Fairhall, James.

“Afterword: Language and History.” James Joyce and the Question of History. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1993, 248.]

Eye dialects, regional dialects, substandard dialects, etc.

12.148

12.265

12.523

At the very beginning of Ulysses, Haines speaks several sentences of Irish to the old milk

woman, but what words he speaks the reader is not privy to.

Jin 1994, 453.

Jin 1994, 458.

110

Xiao-Wen, 712.

Xiao-Wen, 717.

Xiao-Wen, 728.

8.894

11.287

100

11.1160

101

18.1185

102

Jin 1994, 262.

103

12.491

104

Jin 1994, 466.

105

Xiao-Wen, 726.

106

12.323

107

18.935

108

8.558

109

9.560-6

110

Xiao-Wen, 468-9.

111

13.1053

112

1.427

113

Bliss, A. J. “Note Re the Royal Irish Academy Committee for the Study of Anglo-Irish

Language and Literature.” Journal of the Cork Historical and Archeological Society

LXXIII.218, 1968, 182.

114

12.387

115

12.441

116

12.124

117

12.1627-8

118

12.1040

119

15.3895

120

Once when Joyce was asked if he had done a lot of work on Ulysses in the course of the

day, he replied that he had. When asked how many pages he had written, his response was the

he had written two sentences. It took him seven years to write the novel. With this piece of

biographical information in mind, it is easy to understand that every single word of the text

was carefully considered, and that if a protestant speaker says even word out of line (i.e. ‘the’)

then it means something.

121

12.1180. ‘Sassenach’ is a Gaelic (Scottish and Irish) word for ‘outlander’, and has

historically been most commonly assigned to the English so that over time it has accrued a

derogatory connotation. The Citizen accusing the English of speaking in a patois is another

irony, because at least the patois of the English is a recognized language rather than being the

mottled Hiberno-English patois on his lips.

122

15.4493

123

15.4392

124

15.4720-1

125

Jin 1996, 819.

126

Xiao-Wen, 1183.

127

Haines does not escape such brutal categorization either, even if his speech is educated. He

is a raving Englishman who shoots at panthers in his sleep, and is so enamored of the Irish that

he tries to collect Stephen’s little turns of phrase as genius. He has even stupidly gone the

length of learning Irish, in an Ireland where even ‘Mother Ireland’ (the milk lady) does not

recognize the language as Irish, instead asking if it is French. He also blames history for the

actions of the British Empire. For the English prostitute, Zoe, see Ulysses 15.1308-47.

111

128

12.1237-8

129

O’Neill, Patrick. “Other Words, Other Worlds.” Polyglot Joyce: Fictions of Translation.

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003, 89-91.

130

“了解乔伊斯的爱国之心，才能读懂《尤利西斯》。乔伊斯博大精深，可以从各个角度

去研究。我之所以选这个题目，是与我们的民族有关，我们和爱尔兰民族一样，曾受到

外来民族的欺压，读《尤利西斯》会产生这种共鸣。” (“Joyce—Ulysses’ Gaze” (《乔伊斯

——<尤利西斯>的凝视》). Moving Against the Wind (《逆风而行》), 26 April 2005.

http://www.5ilog.com, 15 March 2012.)

This is a portion of an interview with Wen Jieruo, co-translator of Ulysses.

131

Joyce 1967, 252-3.

132

Shen, Fuying (申富英). Nation, Culture and Gender: A Postcolonial Study of Ulysses. (《民

族、文化与性别——后殖民主义视角下的<尤利西斯>研究》). Thesis. Jinan: Shandong

University, 2007, 56.

133

Shen 2007, 26

134

Shen 2007, 25.

135

“亨利八世将爱尔兰琴图案入英国王室纹章以示统治爱尔兰一样。” [Yu, Hongying (于

洪英). “The Theme of National Liberation in Ulysses” (《<尤利西斯>的民族解放主题》).

Foreign Literature Review (《外国文学评论》)4, 1997, 69.]

136

1.307

137

Lü, Liying (吕立营). History in James Joyce’s Ulysses (《<尤利西斯>中的历史》). Thesis.

Jinan: Shandong University, 2010, 9.

138

1.449

139

Lü, 29-30. Shen 2007, 25. Also, Ulysses 1.405.

140

Shen 2007, 48.

141

Lü, 29-30.

142

Shen 2007, iv.

143

“……点出斯蒂芬的家被篡夺这一事实。” [Yu, 71.] For “usurper,” see Ulysses 1.747.

144

Wen, Jieruo (文洁若). “Forging a Conscience in the Unhappy National Spirit” (《在不幸的

民族灵魂中铸造良心》). Dushu (《读书》) 4, 1995, 86.

145

Yu, 69. Also, in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen does leave Ireland, driven

out not only by the many Haineses but also by the many Buck Mulligans surrounding him.

146

Lü, 19.

147

Lü, 19.

148

Shen, Fuying (申富英). “The View of History in Ulysses” (《论<尤利西斯>中的历史观》.

Foreign Literary Research (《外国文学研究》) 3, 2011, 28.

149

Shen 2007, iii.

150

“由于英国殖民民者的残暴统治和野蛮掠夺……文化上死气沉沉。”[Yu, 72.]

151

“.......英国人海恩斯并没有就殖民者给爱尔兰带来的灾难而道歉，而是给殖民者所犯下

的罪恶找到了一个最狡诈的借口。”[Shen 2011, 27.]

152

2.386

153

Shen 2007, 71.

154

Lü, 14.

155

“公民莫名其妙地把一切社会问题都归罪于‘外来人’，谩骂他们的语言粗俗不

堪……”[Yu, 72.]

156

Lü, 12.

157

Shen 2007, vii.

112

158

Lü, 14.

159

2.386

160

2.390-4

161

Upon whom Haines has already heaped blame: “Of course I'm a Britisher, Haines's voice

said, and I feel as one. I don't want to see my country fall into the hands of German jews

either.” (1.666-7)

162

2.347-8

163

2.442

164

12.1157-8

165

Shen 2007, 49.

166

12.1197

167

12.1385-6

168

Lü, 15.

169

Shen 2007, 48.

170

2.350-73

171

Lü, 29. (2.274-6)

172

Shen 2007, 74.

173

Lü, 40.

174

Deane 1995, 361.

175

“……而布卢姆明知妻子在家与剧院经理鲍伊岚交欢，却不敢去过问，只是龟缩在小

酒店里痛苦地想象妻子与别人偷情的情景。” [He, Zhongsheng (何仲生). “Special Analysis

on the Steam-of-Consciousness Novel Ulysses” (意识流小说专题辅导·《尤利西斯》分析). Ed.

Zhongsheng He. A History of Modern Euro-American Literature (《欧美现代文学史》).

Shanghai: Fudan University Press, 2007.]

176

“这种结局也是布卢姆自身所造成的……对莫莉的过分冷淡、生理功能的退化、明知

奸情而不敢回家。” [He 2007.]

177

He 2007.

178

“莫莉与鲍伊岚的私通使得布卢姆的家庭遭到破坏。” [He 2007.]

179

Shen 2007, ix.

180

“……她被来自外部和内部的势力出卖。爱尔兰被出卖，布卢姆家也是如此.” [He

2007.]

181

Shen 2007, 15.

182

Shen 2007, x.

183

Wen 1995, 90. Also, see Ulysses 18.867.

184

Shen 2007, 107.

185

James Joyce on Ulysses, 1920.

186

Yu, 2.

187

“…用乔伊斯自己的话，是写了犹太人和爱尔兰人两个民族的历史。在小说里，两个

民族的历史碎片镶嵌到这一天的生活当中。” [Li, Huaiyu (李怀宇). “Ulysses Readme: A

Key to Unlocking the Text” (《<尤利西斯自述>：一把打开天书的钥匙》). Time Weekly (《时

代周报》) 3.10.2011. http://www.time-weekly.com, 3.10.2012.]

188

Deane 1995, 356.

189

2.279-80

190

2.142

191

Shen 2011, 30.

192

From “Joyce—Ulysses’ Gaze.”

193

Shen 2007, 7. Also, see Ulysses 2.377.

113

194

Shen 2007, 16.

195

Shen 2007, 46.

196

Jameson, Frederic. “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” Social

Text, 15. Durham: Duke University Press, 1986, 69.

197

Lu, Xun. “Preface to Call to Arms.” Selected Stories of Lu Hsun. Trans. Xianyi Yang.

Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1972, 2.

198

Jameson, 65.

199

In China, it was also Shen who initiated the dialogue on the fabrication of history.

114

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